Jewel of the Harem
by Anise
Summary: Desire, deception, and dark magic collide as Draco and Ginny go back in time to find an ancient talisman of power. But they're fighting on opposite sides...
1. Shadows and Beginnings

The shadow by my finger cast  
Divides the future from the past:  
Before it, sleeps the unborn hour,  
In darkness, and beyond thy power:  
Behind its unreturning line,   
The vanished hour, no longer thine:  
One hour alone is in thy hands,   
The _now_ on which the shadow stands.   
--_The Sun-Dial At Wells_, Henry van Dyke. 

Prologue:   
Shadows and Beginnings

"Uh," said Neville.

"Mmm-hmm?" Ginny gave him a vaguely encouraging look from across the little table. 

The light from the tiny lantern flickered on his face. It was hopelessly flustered and growing redder by the moment.

"Do you, uh..." 

Ginny fancied that his big brown puppy-dog eyes were pleading with her. If they could have spoken, their words seemed likely have been something along the lines of, _Can't you see that I've completely forgotten the English language_? 

"Would you like to, er..." The words trailed off, and there was an unbearably long pause. 

Ginny wondered if there were any way of putting Neville out of his misery. A Stupefying charm would work, although some might argue that it would be less than kind. Of course, her feet might pipe up with another point of view, since they were throbbing from dozens of separate little bruises under their thin green leather slippers. If only she didn't know exactly what he was going to ask. 

All evening long, she'd been watching him slowly screw up the courage to say what he so longed to say, making little bets with herself regarding at what point in the endless purgatory of the Yule Ball his bravery would finally overflow into words. She'd known it wasn't going to be during the dancing, since all his energy was going towards the losing battle of standing up straight and not stepping on her feet. (More than once, she'd devoutly wished that she'd actually worn those steel-toed boots, as Hermione had recommended.) It probably wouldn't be when they were standing around the punch bowl, slurping cup after cut-glass cup of fruit juice with a gradually increasing proportion of Ogden's Old Firewhisky. (Ginny wondered if the evening might be improved by grabbing the bottle from Goyle's hand and swigging it down as he sniggered with Crabbe behind the refreshment table.) And it certainly wasn't going to take place while a stream of Gryffindor fifth and sixth years sat at their table and the shrill giggles of the girls pierced Ginny's head. But almost everyone else had cleared out of the Great Hall by now. The Bavarian dwarf band was playing accordion and flugelhorn slowly and dreamily for the few remaining couples circling round the dance floor. So it was bound to be now. 

"D'you want to, uh, uh, er, go outside, Ginny?"

_Poor Neville_.

She sipped from her glass of punch, buying a moment's time. A group of caroling Rhine fairies chose that moment to hover in the air between them. 

"_O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum, wie grun sind deinen Blatter_!" they chirped in trilling little voices, their blurring wings beating faster than sight. 

"Go away," Neville said irritably. 

"St. Niklaus vill put coal in your stocking, naughty boy," said the smallest fairy, wrapped from head to toe in a blue and white striped scarf with purple tassels. She waved a miniscule finger threateningly. 

"Oh, you-- I'll chance it. Shoo." Neville flapped a hand at the fairy choir.

The fairies stuck their tongues out as one and flew off through his hair, leaving each strand sticking out in a different direction. He blushed an extraordinarily violent shade of red, which clashed rather badly with his dark purple dress robes. Ginny couldn't help smiling. The look on his face tore her with guilt. She knew it was the first time she'd smiled at him all night long. 

"Well? We could, ah, go for a walk in the rose garden, it's not really all that cold, and anyway I'll keep you warm, I mean, uh-" Obviously horrified at his own boldness, Neville backpedaled quickly. "I think I've got an extra scarf somewhere, my Gran sent me two for Christmas and there's this green one and it would really look good on you, I mean with your hair and the dress and all, and-"

Neville did look so like a Golden Retriever puppy hunting for an owner. Ginny wondered in a detached sort of way if he'd actually grow a tail and start wagging it next. 

"I saw a really pretty rose bush last week, I'm sure it's blooming this week, I've been watching the buds start to open, I'd love to show it to you," he was saying. Ginny smiled again, vaguely. Neville moved forward a little, his brown eyes wide and adoring. "It's called 'Maiden's Blush.' The pink roses remind me of your cheeks," he added in a rush. She felt his clammy hand pressing hers under the table. How sweet he was. His eager, simple heart was in his face. He was as plain and good as bread and water. 

And he made her want to scream. 

What would happen, Ginny wondered, if she simply leaped on top of the table, opened her mouth as wide as it would go, and began screaming? 

But it wasn't his fault. None of it was Neville's fault. 

Then she looked up and saw the one of the people on her ever-increasing list of those she would have given her right arm _not _to see. Another was Neville, of course. But that was rather a tall order, since he was her date. Colin Creevey was advancing on them with a fixedly bright smile and a camera. "Say cheese!" he chirped through gritted teeth, raising his new Hasselblad.

"Oh, no, Colin, _please_, I'm--" Ginny threw her hands up. A horribly bright flash of light went off directly in front of her face. 

"Ooh! Sorry! That was too _close_, wasn't it? It'll be all out of focus. Here, let me get _another_! If you don't _mind_!"

"Colin--"

"I know! Let's have a picture of the two lovebirds_ together_!" Colin plopped down between Neville and Ginny, turning the lense attachment back and forth with exaggerated sweeps of his elbow. 

Neville's chair scraped against the stone flags of the floor as he rose to his feet. "Skive off, Creevey," he growled. 

"Well, I think that's for Ginny to decide, isn't it?" said Colin. 

"This table isn't big enough for the three of us."

Colin rose as well. "Then someone'll have to leave, won't they?" The two boys glared at each other, and Ginny stifled a groan. _They might as well be wearing tigerskin loincloths and carrying clubs!_

She saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Harry, Ron, and Hermione were walking out the front doors of the entrance hall into the gardens outside, their heads together. Ginny put a hand on Neville's arm. 

"I _would _like to see that rosebush," she said firmly. "Won't you show it to me?"

Colin glared at Neville. Neville sneered at Colin. The expression was very odd on his pleasant face. _Looks like he's trying out his best Draco Malfoy imitation_, thought Ginny. She shuddered. That was the crowning touch to this miserable evening-- thinking about Malfoy. 

It was much warmer than it should have been in late December; the air had an almost springlike feeling, but maybe that was because of the enchantments needed to force the rosebushes to bloom. The scent of roses was in the mildly chilled air, and Ginny sniffed it as Neville arranged her cloak around her shoulders. His hands lingered on her bare neck in an almost-caress. Well, this was the price of getting away from Colin Creevey, she supposed. They walked down one of the winding gravel paths. She searched for something to say. 

"You shouldn't let Colin get to you like that. He lives for people's reactions, you know." 

Ginny immediately decided that that had been the wrong subject to bring up. She should have known better. After all, Neville remembered every bit as well as she did that Colin had been her date for the Yule Ball last year. His face darkened. 

"Oh-- I don't want to talk about Colin Creevey right now-- can we not?" 

"All right."

Unfortunately, no alternate topics of conversation presented themselves. 

"Nice night," was Neville's profound observation after several minutes of walking. 

"Mm-hm."

More silence, broken only by the crunch of their footsteps on the gravel and the light tinkling of a faraway fountain. 

"You look-- pretty," he said awkwardly. 

"Thanks." Ginny sighed almost unconsciously, spreading out the skirt of her fitted green dress robes with their darker green ribbon threaded through the bodice and waist. She remembered what she'd been thinking when she'd picked them out at Madam Malkin's dress shop, and who she thought would be admiring them tonight-- no, it was better not to think of _that_. 

"There's the rosebush." Neville pointed. It had dark green foliage and was covered with pink roses in all stages of rose life, from buds to full-blown. They sat on the granite bench in front of it. He looked from side to side and then picked the largest rose, handing it to her. She smiled and brought it to her nose.

"Oh really, Neville, you shouldn't have done that."

"I'd do anything for you." The words were undoubtedly meant to be casual, but came out as a rather choked and high-pitched declaration. Ginny sat silent, still smelling the rose. Well, there it was, yet another thing to be added on the credit side of the Neville Longbottom list. She pictured herself scratching away with a quill on a long parchment, grimacing horribly as she did so. _Put it right under nice, sweet, sensitive, carries my books for me, likes the dreadfully bad poetry I write, tried to beat up Draco Malfoy the time he sneered at me for dancing with Harry on May Day... _knows _I have a hopeless crush on Harry and waits patiently, sure I'll eventually figure out what's in my heart... _Ginny examined her heart. What was in it at this moment mostly seemed to be a desperate panicky desire to run out off the cliff and into the lake rather than let Neville kiss her. His face was very earnest in the moonlight, and he was leaning closer to her. She really shouldn't be thinking that he resembled a sheep more than a puppy. 

_I do wish his lips weren't quite so... rubbery_. A lot of fumbling followed. Ginny couldn't quite understand; she wanted desperately for _someone _to kiss her. She'd been practicing her best kisses on the back of her hand for weeks now. So why was it that all she could feel was a vague distaste? A counter was whirring in her head. _All right, if I let him kiss me for five minutes, does that make up for half the list... a quarter of the list? Three-sixteenths of the list? If I let him put his hand down the front of my dress-- erggh, feels sort of-- _slimy_-- could I say that equals the time I made him read that awful sonnet I wrote for Harry, _My Deepest, Darkest Secrets of the Soul_-- wait a minute-- that's Harry's voice, I'm_ sure _it is! _She sat bolt upright, trapping Neville's hand between her chest and the tight bodice of the dress. 

"I reckon you've got to draw another cone at the bottom if you expect it to work," Harry was saying on the other side of the hedge. 

"I don't see why." That was Ron, speaking in his most stubborn voice.

"Don't you remember what Feynman said?" That was Hermione, speaking in her bossiest voice. 

"Ginny, if you could just lean forward a bit--" said Neville. 

"Shh!" Ginny said. 

"Who?" asked Ron. 

"Honestly," sighed Hermione. "How did you managed to pass Magiphysics class_? Richard Feynman_. The Nobel Prize winner? The CalTech physicist?"

"Oh. The Muggle."

"Ron, you're so thick sometimes it's a wonder you don't walk into walls."

"I'm sorry we can't all be as brilliant as you, 'Mione."

"I hate that nickname and you know it!"

"Stop it," said Harry. "We're wasting time."

Ginny scrambled onto the bench. Neville was yanked up with her. 

"Ow! Ginny, my hand's caught in your--"

She looked down on three heads pressed together, one bushy brown, one black, one fiery red, all mulling over a piece of parchment in Hermione's hand. Trust her to bring homework to the Yule Ball. Or was it? Ginny stood on tiptoe, trying to see more clearly. Yes, it was Harry; she'd know him anywhere even without seeing his face. His dark hair was messy as always, and there was that little mannerism he had of jerking his neck slightly when he was arguing with Hermione. Unobserved, she looked her fill. Just as she'd thought. He didn't have a date. It wasn't that he wanted anyone else; he just didn't want _her._ The old familiar pang of pain rushed into her chest.She'd been so sure, so _sure_ that _this_ time--

Ginny felt a pinch in a very uncomfortable place. "Neville!" she hissed. 

"Ginny, I'm not trying to, my hand's stuck!" he hissed back. 

"So it would have to be a wormhole?" said Harry. 

"_Some_ of us are paying attention, apparently." Hermione spoke to Harry, but glared at Ron.

Ginny leaned closer, her brows knitting. Their words meant nothing to her. But then, so much of what they'd been talking about all fall long was a mystery. There had been so many snippets of conversation, hurried whispered conferences that had ended the moment any of them saw her, and carefully blank faces turned towards her when she interrupted them. They were pondering how to most discreetly have her hauled off to the booby hatch at St. Mungo's, for all she knew. Harry's head was bent over the parchment, and she could _almost _see what was on it. If she could just get a _bit _closer...

Ouch!

"Neville, this really is going too far!" She turned on him. "If _Ron_ saw you doing that--"

Neville's answer was not terribly articulate. With a whimper, he pitched headlong into Colin Creevey, who was lurking about the hedge in an attempt to get candid photos of Harry. 

"What on _earth_?" screeched Hermione, jumping backwards and dropping the parchment. 

"Mmph--mpph-phh!" explained Neville as he rolled over and over the gravel with Colin.

"Maybe I should have agreed to pose for that calendar he wanted," Harry said in a stricken voice. 

"Who cares about that stupid git and his stupid camera-- Neville!" Ron growled. He leaned down and spoke directly into his right ear as Colin boxed the left one. "I told you to keep her _away_ from us." 

Neville turned his head towards Ron. "Just a sec, Colin, I need to explain-- how was I to know that you'd end up behind that rosebush! I told you I'd be taking her there and I_ told _you where it was and--"

"Wait a minute!" exclaimed Ginny. "You mean that you discussed our date with my _brother_?"

"Gin, I had to have an itemized list of everything he planned to do tonight before I was going to let you out of my sight," Ron said impatiently. "We spent hours negotiating it and hammering out terms. I tried putting him under a _Nolo Meus Soror Tangere_ charm so he'd have to stay six inches away from you at all times, but McGonagall caught me at it and took ten points from Gryffindor." He looked at Ginny suspiciously. "Only _one _kiss, right? On the forehead?"

"Well, actually, he had his hand stuck down my dress, but that wasn't altogether his fault--" 

"Right then," said Ron. "Out of the way, Colin. It's my turn." 

"Stop it!" Ginny pulled at her brother's arm. 

"I ask you to do a simple little thing like keeping my sister away from here, and as usual you manage to bollocks it up," said Ron, between blows, only slightly hampered by Ginny, who was dragged slightly forward with each punch. 

"What do you mean, keeping me away from here?" Ginny demanded. 

Ron's fist froze in mid-punch, and he exchanged looks with Harry, Hermione, and at last, reluctantly, with Neville. A secret understanding seemed to pass between them all. Colin stomped off, sniffling slightly. In the silence that followed, Ginny's hands grew colder and colder. The little comedy of errors was over. 

"Ginny, we just-- we needed to have a private conversation, that's all," said Hermione. 

"You mean, like the ones you've been having all term long? The ones_ I've _been excluded from?" 

"Look, sis, there are things you can't understand," Ron said awkwardly. He helped Neville to his feet. 

"How do you know? You haven't told me. None of you have," said Ginny. 

"Maybe someday we can, but not now." 

"Why not?"

"You're a child," said Ron. 

"That's ridiculous. I'm almost sixteen!" Ginny could hear the slight whine in her voice and knew that she should shut up, but something was driving her on, pushing her to say words she might later regret. 

"Ginny. Be reasonable. You don't tell us everything, now do you?" Hermione's voice was coaxing and firm, and her face was fixed in a smile. Ginny could feel the anger bubbling and rising in her; oh, how she needed to keep it down and under control. The best thing to do would be to turn and leave. Graciously. Silently. Elegantly. Instead, she turned to Harry. 

"And what do you think, Harry?" she asked. "Do you think I should know?" Her eyes couldn't help going over him, just once, his lean muscular body in his gray dress robes, his lanky graceful hands, his handsome face; scanning all of him and taking in another image to turn over and over in her mind later, in privacy. 

"I-- I suppose I think," he said haltingly, "that it's safer if you don't know. It really is, Ginny. It's best." He looked soberly back at her, and she saw herself mirrored in the edge of his glasses. She winced at the eager hunger on her face. 

All four of them looked back at her in a united front. All of their faces were closed and distant, waiting for her to be quiet and go away-- yes, even Neville's. He'd been happy enough to grope at her five minutes before but now he was standing with them, in whatever plan they were hatching. Without her. When it came to anything important, it was always without her. She heard herself yelling before she even realized that she'd opened her mouth. 

"Who wants to know what your stupid secret is anyway! I don't! Keep it from me, if you want!"

Hermione was coming towards her now, her smile more fixed than ever. "Ginny, you shouldn't be getting so upset over--"

That was the final straw. 

"I hate you! I hate you all!" She sounded juvenile and stupid and laughable; she knew her face was turning the red that so clashed with her hair and dumb tears were pouring down her face, and before she could do anything to make herself look an even greater fool than she had already, she turned and ran down the gravel path in the opposite direction. Something rustled around Ginny's feet. It was the parchment Hermione had been holding; she must have dropped it. In one swift motion, Ginny picked it up and kept running.

She stopped to catch her breath. There were footsteps coming after her. She turned down one path, then another. "Ginny!" she heard Neville's voice calling. "Please come back, do! I'm sorry-- I didn't mean--" She ran faster and he followed her, tracking her with uncanny accuracy. "Ginny, please, if you just stop acting like a child we'll--" That was Hermione. Ginny put on an extra burst of speed. She headed away from the center of the garden maze, back towards Hogwarts. She slipped through a side door and stood, breathing so hard that she was sure they could hear her. All four of them went by, yelling her name. Then they were gone. 

But she didn't dare go back outside; they might still be waiting for her. She slowly climbed the winding staircase that led up to the high north tower. It was exposed to the wind and would be horribly cold. She'd be sure to be alone there. She reached the top of the stairs and stood on the balcony, looking out over the grounds. She could see the faint twinkling lights far below in the garden, the movement of students strollling with each other, holding hands, kissing. There were Ron and Hermione, by themselves now. She leaned her head on his shoulder; he said something, and she threw back her head and laughed. _Probably at me_, Ginny thought. She shivered. She was alone with her tangled thoughts. Alone with the anger that tore through her veins, setting her teeth, clenching her hands into fists. She no longer knew what she was angry at, if she ever had known; she no longer could have said when the anger began, or even if it really could be called anger at all. But it was something that pulsed through her at random times, always when she least expected it, a feeling more intense than anyone else seemed to know. 

Her brother and Hermione were kissing now, his hands in her hair, her head turned up to his. Watching them, Ginny felt something very close to envy. They both seemed so... uncomplicated. If only she could be like that. Sometimes, this term, she would cry into her pillow late at night, muffling her sobs with a Silencing charm so her roommates wouldn't hear them. Sometimes she tossed and turned in her bed when the moonlight spilled through the window, turning her sheets to a sea of bleached blood. She didn't have the grace or coordination to play on the Quidditch team, but some mornings she rose before dawn and slipped silently out, taking one of the school brooms up over the pitch to fly, fly, fly for hours through the coldest part of the morning. She would bend low over the broomstick of a Shooting Star or Clean Sweep, feeling the icy wind whistle past her ears, the tension in her head dissolving for a few moments. When she eased back to earth, her fingers numb, scarcely able to feel her feet, the restless thing in her would be quieted for a little while. 

Ginny felt a dull pain in her hand and realized that she was pounding her fist against the stone balustrade. She swore softly. _If Ron even suspected I knew words like that..._ The thought made her smile. She was really starting to grow cold now, she realized. She turned to go back down. 

But then she heard a faint rustling. Someone else was coming up the steps. _Probably Neville! _Ginny groaned and slipped behind a large potted bush. With any luck, he wouldn't even see her. 

A/N: Review! Review! Review! Lots more coming soon! Tell me in your review if you want to be on the superspecial mailing list for updates, cookies, and more! 


	2. Interludes in the Garden

A/N: If you recognize it, it's JKR's; if you don't, it's mine. Or it's authentic history, as this thing was researched to death. Yup, this is also up at fictionalley, but this version is very slightly different in places. Nothing major, it just evolved that way. Marie-France is referred to earlier, and Alistor Moody's name is spelled right. And yes, there is a Yahoo group coming soon, with the work of both me and the wondrously talented VioletJersey. Oh. And, btw, JOTH is going to be every bit as long as GoF. That's the way I write 'em. God only knows how many chapters it will run into. Just so you know… (cackled evilly.)

"Mmmmm," said Pansy Parkinson as Draco Malfoy pressed a little line of kisses along her throat, her head thrown back. Her hands moved under her robes, caressing his back, easing round front to his chest. "Do you like that?" she asked. 

_Oh, yes, I like it fine. I just don't like _you. The words were on the tip of his tongue as it lingered over the pulse at Pansy's bony collarbone, but, on reflection, he knew that it would be far better not to say them. His hands pulled her closer, feeling her tiny frame, her ribs separate and distinct beneath his fingers. She moved back, cocking her head towards the hedge behind them. 

"Did you hear a noise? I heard a noise." She smoothed down her pink robes. "That's all we need, to get caught by creepy old Snape. Not that I think he'd give _you_ detention." She giggled. "He'd probably want to watch." 

_Thanks, Parkinson. There's nothing quite so stimulating as thinking about Snape watching me snogging you; has it all over staring at Playwizard centerfolds. _

The noise was not repeated, but he did not move towards her again. She nestled against his chest. He fought down an urge to shove her off the bench. It wasn't really Pansy's fault, after all. She tried to put her arms around him again, but Draco's muscles stiffened, subtly pushing her away. Pansy cleared her throat. 

"I don't know, I think these robes make me look fat. Do you think I look fat?"

"No, Pansy." Draco shook his head, rolling his eyes slightly. Girls ought to be given a list of topics _not _to bring up or even think about on a date, and asking if they looked fat should be written at the top in blazing red letters. Of course, he really couldn't talk. Number one on the boys' list was likely to be snogging a girl who made your skin crawl, just because you felt this sort of desperate unfocussed desire that had to go somewhere before it tore you apart. 

She shifted on the bench and apparently decided to change the subject. "Are you going home for Christmas holidays?"

Well, there was number two. On his own personal list, anyway. "I don't know," said Draco. "I suppose so." 

"But we had to tell Snape last week if we were staying."

"Father hasn't told_ me _yet." 

"Oh." 

There was something about that one syllable, Draco decided, that sounded strange on Pansy's lips. As if she knew something he didn't... Did she? "What about you?"

She jumped slightly, as if she'd been deep in thought. "I'm going home of course. I don't know how cheerful it's likely to be."

"Yes, I know what you mean," said Draco curtly. 

Pansy sighed. "It's a bit of a low point for _us_, you know?" She emphasized the word slightly, and Draco knew what she meant. 

The wind rustled through the bushes, bringing the scent of roses to them both. Draco remembered the overgrown rose gardens at the von Drachen estate in Linz, blooming when they were supposed to, in summer. There was something rather creepy and unnatural about roses in December for all that it was supposed to be charming. _Linz. _Oh Gods, how he wished he were there now. Or stepping on board the ship to head there for the Christmas holidays, or even staying here at Hogwarts, anywhere on earth except Malfoy Manor--

"Your birthday's going to be over the holidays, isn't it?" Pansy was asking. Draco dragged his mind out of the peaceful fields and woods of Bavaria with an effort. 

"The day after Boxing Day, yes."

She leaned back further against his chest. "Your seventeenth birthday..." He knew what she was thinking. It was what he was thinking, as well. "So, are they going to--"

He tapped a finger against his lips, scowling at her. 

"Oh, of course, I'm sorry. Not very clever to talk about it here. Too much punch!" She giggled. "But there might be surprises in store for you... you never know..."

She _did_ know something he didn't! 

"What have you heard?" he whispered intensely in her ear. 

"Oh, that tickles. I pick up things. I overhear Mum and Dad at home. And..." Her last word trailed off tantalizingly. 

Draco glowered down at her. Her smile was teasing; that look was meant to be enticing, he supposed, but at that moment he wanted nothing so much as to shake her by her thin shoulders and get the whole truth out of her. A fleeting image flashed through his mind of grabbing her by the throat and choking her until she gasped out all her secrets; her dark eyes mocked his silvery ones, and the violence of his feelings overflowed in the only way available. She growled as he grabbed her and started ravaging her mouth with his; he snarled as she tore at the front of his robes, and, with the finesse of two wild animals battling over a kill, they fell on each other. 

Later, thinking the whole thing over in the relative privacy of his prefect's room in the Slytherin dormitory, Draco would be profoundly grateful to Colin Creevey. When the boy stumbled out of the hedge a few minutes later clutching his camera and sprawled onto the stone bench, however, he seemed a most unwelcome intrusion. 

"_Ooh_! Oh, I'm _sorry_!" he gasped. His round face blushed bright red. "Not a good moment, is it?" 

Draco yanked his head up from Pansy's bare chest. " What the_ hell _are you doing here, Creevey?"

"Complete accident!" Colin backed away from Draco's murderous expression. "Never meant to-- er, you really ought to pull your trousers up, Malfoy--" He ducked as Draco took a swing at him. 

"Get off me!" shrieked Pansy. Colin pushed himself up, but his hands, unfortunately, were very much on Pansy's not-quite-clothed body as he did so. He backed away from Draco across the bench, raising his Hasselblad. 

"I'll-- I'll take a picture of you!" he threatened in a squeaky voice. 

"I'll smash your camera," Draco said flatly, reaching out to make good the threat. 

_Flash!_

"You little bastard!" 

Colin scampered down the path with the agility of a rat. "Ha-ha!" he called over his shoulder as he ran. Draco tried to chase him, became entangled in his own trousers, and fell headlong onto the path with a thud. _Oof._ Gingerly, he picked bits of gravel from his cheek. Then he heard the shrill sound of giggling. He turned to see Pansy clutching the side of the bench and snorting with laughter. 

"Stop laughing," he said, picking himself up. 

"Oh, I can't help it, you looked so funny--" She was seized by new transports of merriment. 

"Don't you dare to laugh at me!"

She patted the bench next to her. "Come on, Draco. Why don't you let me finish what we started."

"No." He turned away from her and began buttoning his robes. 

Her mouth fell open. "No?"

"Do you have a hearing problem? No." 

"Boys don't tell me _no_." 

"This one just did."

Pansy put her hands on her hips. "What's the matter with you?"

Oh, how he _itched _to tell her; the words were on his lips, scalding, furious words. 

Her voice grew wheedling. "You must be nervous. I'll bet that's it. You've never done this before, have you?"

"Yes, I most certainly have, and no, that's not it. "

Pansy looked at him with unflattering surprise. "Who? It was Milicent Bulstrode, wasn't it, after she lost all that weight?"

Draco was silent. 

"Or that sixth-year prefect, what was her name, Xanthia?"

He finished fastening the top button on his velvet dress robes. 

"Or Sadina von Tussel... Is it true what everybody says, does she really have handcuffs permanently fixed to her bedposts?"

_Yes, yes, and yes. To all your questions, Pansy. But if it's any consolation, I despised all of them every bit as much I do you. All of them except... Marie-France._ But a wave of hurtful sensual memories pierced him, as always, when he thought of his cousin, Marie-France Tessier, and of the Christmas holidays one year before. No, it would never do to remember her, and the beaches of St. Tropez, and the little spray of salt roses, pink as her cheeks. He ran a hand through his hair, restoring it to its customary neatness. 

"What you need," she said spitefully, "is a harem."

_Hmm...__ it would simplify matters, wouldn't it?_

"You don't really care anything about anyone, do you, Malfoy?" Pansy looked into the darkness. 

"Don't tell me that _you_ care about _me_, Parkinson." Reverting to last names was, he supposed, a sign that the romantic portion of the date had come to an end. What a relief. 

"Oh, I don't. Don't think I do." She looked at him with glittering eyes. "Neither does anyone else, you know." And then she was laughing at him again, very softly. 

"Stop it. Stop that!"

"Or you'll do what?"

"Don't-- _push_ me like that," he said through gritted teeth. "Or you'll be sorry."

"Then why don't you try _making_ me sorry, Malfoy," she whispered, and he nearly jumped on her out of sheer anger and frustration and all the feelings coiled deep in the pit of his stomach that needed some kind of release, somewhere, with someone. 

"_No_. No, I won't," he said instead. 

"You were happy enough to try five minutes ago."

What she said was true. That fact only made him angrier. 

"Do you want to know the truth?" he spat. "All right, I'll tell you. I can't stand having you or any of those other Slytherin bitches anywhere near me ninety percent of the time. You all make me want to throw up. The only time I can endure being near any of you is when I want a shag so badly that I don't care how much I hate you, and the moment I've got what I needed out of you, you could fall off the face of the earth for all I care. In fact, I wish all of you would. _Especially_ you." 

"You can't mean that."

"I do. If you knew what I really thought of you, you'd run screaming down that path."

Pansy turned her face away. "I suppose you haven't noticed that none of those other girls have exactly been hanging about you lately."

Draco said nothing, because there was nothing to say. She was right. His little triumphs with Xanthia and Milicent and Sadina were all very much in the past. 

"They know. They know that it's over. They know that your father's become--"

He gripped her wrist. "Don't say another word. Not one more."

"You're hurting me. Oh! Let go. " 

"Should be around your throat. Pity it isn't. Maybe I'll--"

"You're mad," she whispered. 

He leaned his face down to hers. "Don't-_- ever-_- say-- that."

"Why? Does it make you afraid?" 

It did. He would have died before admitting it to her. But she already knew _something_; he was sure of it. 

"It _is _true what they say, then, isn't it? About your father? It's true that he's been--"

_"Shut up_!" Draco's tortured cry hung in the air between them. There was a long moment of silence. Pansy's face was white and frightened. Draco realized that he'd been advancing on her, pushing her further and further back along the bench, and he knew from the numb, tingling feel of it that his own face was suffused with fury and fear. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he was ashamed of himself. Without another word, he rose and stalked down the gravel path. 

The soft wind, the indistinct murmuring of happy students strolling, the scent of roses-- it was all more than he could bear. Draco needed to feel cold lashing at his face, icy fingers down his spine, solitude. Only one place to go, then. He turned his steps toward the high north tower. The endless steps of the winding stone staircase left his thigh muscles burning, but he welcomed the pain. Alone, oh God he'd be alone there, it was all he wanted. But even as he reached the balcony, he heard the rustling of other footsteps behind his. Cursing softly, he slipped behind a large bush at the edge of the terrace. 

The footsteps Ginny had heard hesitated, stopped, then headed in her direction. Sure enough, it must be Neville. Ginny groaned at the thought of all the apologizing she'd have to do. But then she heard the faint sound of other footsteps. Not the same as the first set. No, these were-- she listened closely-- at least two people walking together. _So much for solitude! _She stood indecisively, biting her lip. As she wondered what to do, an arm snaked around her and a hand went over her mouth. 

"Mmph!" She struggled in vain. The arms holding her were thin but wiry and strong, and they pulled her back against a lithe, sinewy body that held her firmly. She saw out of the corner of her eye that whoever had his hands on her was a little shorter than she, but then many boys were; there was a movement of black velvet dress robes swirling around him. This was_ not _Neville! Ginny jerked her head to the side and caught a flash of blond hair, the profile of a pale face with a small, straight nose and pointed chin, the glint of a strangely light eye-- 

Oh God. 

_"Malfoy_?" she asked incredulously. 

"Be quiet," he whispered. 

"Let go of me!"

In response, his arms tightened around her even further. They felt like iron bands; she never would have guessed from looking at him that he was so strong. Not that she'd ever spent any time looking at him, of course. He pulled her head down to his mouth. 

"Someone else just came up here. In fact--" Draco peered between branches of the bush. "At least three people from what I can see. Now, do you really want us to be seen together? Everyone at Hogwarts would hear about it within the hour." 

"_No_!"

"Then keep your mouth _shut._" He gave her a slight shake to emphasize his words. 

An angry retort sprang to Ginny's lips, but she bit it back. The footsteps were coming closer. She tensed in Draco's arms, and was still. Through the irregular green leaves of the bush, she saw a figure leaning against the stone balustrade. _Cornelius Fudge_? She squinted at him. Yes, it was; she'd certainly seen him with Dad often enough to be sure of that. 

"Lovely night, isn't it," he said to someone behind him. "Such a treat to enjoy this sort of weather in December, don't you think?"

"That's as may be." The second person moved out from the shadows with a clump-_thump,_ clump-_thump,_ clump-_thump_. Just behind her ear, Ginny heard Draco suck in his breath. She could feel his chest moving, too. A strange sensation. She'd never, never been anywhere near this close to him, not since the first day she ever saw him in Diagon Alley, jibing at Harry. _Harry_. Probably still looking for her along with the others. The thought made her shift a little, restlessly, which only caused Draco to grasp her more tightly. 

"_Don't_! I'm not trying to get away," she said as quietly as she could. 

He hardly seemed to hear her. "Mad-eye Moody," he said. "What's he doing here?" 

"I'm sure I don't know. What, are you afraid he's going to turn you into a ferret?"

"I wasn't talking to you." Draco's grip did not loosen. 

The Minister of Magic turned again, in the other direction, and spoke to a third person. "The view's delightful, Albus, isn't it?"

Ginny saw the familiar figure of Professor Dumbledore step out onto the balcony and into her field of vision. "A very clear night," he said musingly. "I do believe that the Milky Way is visible."

Fudge cleared his throat. "Well, as pleasant as all this is, it's rather cold on this side." He pulled his pinstriped robes more closely about him. "I must say that I really don't quite understand why we've been brought up here."

"Discussion," growled Moody. 

"But what can there be to discuss?"

Moody leaned against the balustrade next to Dumbledore. "Very private place, this north tower. Good if you don't want to be overheard."

Dumbledore nodded gravely. 

"Now, really, gentlemen... _overheard_?" Fudge laughed a bit nervously. 

"They picked the wrong place, didn't they?" muttered Draco. 

"I thought you said we should be quiet," said Ginny.

"So I did. Shh." 

"I've been hearing things," said Moody. "Rumblings. Some of the Death Eaters are moving again."

Fudge made an impatient movement with his hand. "Rubbish. There's nowhere _for_ them to move."

"That's what you think."

"Moody, do be reasonable."

"Yep. That's what I always am. Reasonable. Which means listening to reason. Which means paying attention to what's going on about me." Moody turned so that he was fully visible, and the cold white light of the moon flooded over his scarred face. It seemed about as expressive as a block of wood, but there was an alertness on it that was impossible to mistake. 

The other man sighed. "Since it seems necessary, Professor Moody, to provide a recap of events-- may I remind you that we've heard nothing of, er, You-Know-Who in well over a year?"

"So what did the Department of Mysteries finally decide?" drawled Moody. The twisted face looked almost amused. 

Fudge shrugged. "As to that, you know very well. So far as can be determined, the_ Priori Incantatem _spell had a quite unexpected effect. V- I mean, You-Know-Who was so ill established in a physical form that such powerful magic jolted him from it. Quite permanently, as far as we can tell. None of his followers have ever been able to return him to what he was."

"He remains only as a spirit of malice," said Dumbledore quietly, and Ginny realized that it was the first time the Headmaster had spoken. "Gnawing the ends of his old plots,choking on his own evil, but never able to take form or shape again."

"Quite," said Fudge, a relieved tone in his voice. "Goodness. I feel like a schoolmaster myself!" He attempted a chuckle, which fell flat. 

"So why are you still afraid to say his name, Fudge?" asked Moody. 

"I don't like the sound of it, that's all," the other man snapped. "Don't tell me that you think Voldemort-- there, all right, I've said it-- has a prayer of rising again!"

Moody paused. "No," he finally said. "No, I don't." 

"Then there's nothing to worry about." 

Moody leaned towards Fudge. "There were other powers than Voldemort," he said. "Older ones. And darker."

"Yes, well, nothing fascinates me quite so much as history, my dear man, but the dead past doesn't concern us now."

"_Dead_," Moody said derisively, under his voice. "Dead, is it?"

Fudge turned to Dumbledore as if he hadn't heard. "Which reminds me. Albus, you really ought to relax some of the security about Hogwarts, you know. It simply isn't necessary anymore. And quite honestly we don't really have the manpower to keep it up."

"I think it will remain, for the time being," Dumbledore said gravely. 

"Well, as you wish. And now, I really must return; the tips of my ears must be frozen by now." Fudge reached up and felt them, shivering. On the threshhold of the stairs, he turned. "Truthfully, Albus-- and, er, Moody-- a little less paranoia would suit you better."

They stayed where they stood as Fudge trotted down the stairs, his footsteps receding. Then Moody said, "Stupid git."

"Cornelius is rather short-sighted, I'm afraid," said Dumbledore thoughtfully. 

"He's lucky if he can see anything written in red letters a metre high and shoved right under his nose."

"I had hoped-- well, no matter. You could have been clearer about Grindelwald, you know."

Moody snorted. "It wouldn't have done any good and you know it. He wanted to dismiss me as a raving old crackpot anyway; why make it easier for him?"

"I suppose you're right." Dumbledore turned, and Ginny wondered if they were both going back down. And that name. _Grindelwald._Where had she heard it before? But then he leaned closer to Moody and spoke in a lower tone. "I believe that we must go ahead with the plan."

The other man nodded. "We don't have a choice. He'd never listen to reason."

"How close is it to readiness?"

"Everything's set up in the lower dungeon.  We have containment in the clock tower. The _Tenere_ spell did the trick, all right-- I've been there twice myself and returned."

"Alistor!" Dumbledore put his hand on Moody's shoulder. "That was incredibly risky."

"So you're saying the _plan's_ not?" Moody asked dryly. 

"You have a point." The headmaster looked at him. "It doesn't seem to have done you any harm."

"Nope. And it won't do them any either."

"I wonder," said Dumbledore, staring out into the darkness, "if it is right to involve... They may agree, but they won't really understand."

"Does anyone? Did I? Did you?"

"No. I suppose not." Dumbledore sighed.

"Then there's only one thing we're waiting for. We need a sixth. And no, I don't know who, not yet. I'll know when I find them. I think--" Moody began clumping towards the door "-- I think I'll be led to them. Looking won't do any good. And now we'd better go. We've been up here far too long already. You never really know who might be listening." Ginny gulped at that. 

"_So... _the hunt for _Al-Juhara Har-am_ begins?" said Dumbledore softly. 

"Yes," replied Moody. Both men nodded, as if a sign and countersign had been given. And maybe they had been, thought Ginny. Her head was spinning wildly. She didn't have the faintest idea what their last words meant, but almost none of the rest of the conversation had made any sense, either. 

They were alone on the balcony. Ginny shivered, feeling the cold wind across her low-necked robe for the first time, and huddled closer to the warm body behind hers in the split second before she remembered that it was Draco Malfoy. Then she struggled to get away. 

"Let me go," she said, trying to sound unafraid. 

"In a minute." Draco's hand actually seemed to be tightening on her wrists. 

"Ow-- you're hurting me-- I'll scream!"

He put a hand over her mouth. She bit it. 

"I ought to strangle you," he said. 

"Try it," she said. 

Draco trapped both her hands beneath his and forced her against the balustrade._ He's going to push me over,_ Ginny thought almost calmly. _I heard something I wasn't supposed to hear and now I'm going to die for it. And my last sight in this life is going to be Malfoy's face. I wonder, if I go to hell does that mean I have to keep seeing his face for all eternity? _But long moments passed, and nothing happened. 

"I'm not going to do anything to you, Weasley," he said. "Just tell me why you were here, and I'll let you go." 

"I wanted some--fresh air," she said weakly. 

He snorted. "The air on the ground wasn't fresh enough?"

"With everyone running about shagging in the gardens, no, it wasn't." If she was really going to get pushed over the edge of the north tower by her worst enemy, Ginny decided that there was no point in being meek. 

Draco laughed mirthlessly. 

"What's so funny?"

"Your stupid friends don't know how sharp that little tongue of yours really is, do they?" He leaned closer to her, and his face was absolutely without expression, the silvery eyes glittering like miniature moons. "Potter and your stupid brother and that jumped-up mudblood Granger... they all think you're a sweet, innocent little girl, don't they?"

Ginny gulped, unsure what to answer. The conversation had taken a sudden and strange turn. He was frightening her, but in a different way than when she'd thought he was going to heave her over the edge of the tower. She didn't really think he'd do that now. But she felt no safer than she had before. The parchment rustled in her hands, and she remembered that she'd been holding it all the time. _From the Desk of Hermione Granger_ was stamped on the top. Draco sucked in his breath and tried to grab it from her; she held on so tightly that it ripped in half. Impatiently, he shoved the two torn edges together. They both stared at it.

Two cones were balanced on each other with several straight lines intersecting them, each headed in a different direction. On another part of the paper was drawn a tunnel with two flat mouths, snaking across the parchment. There were little charts and graphs. There were scribbled words. _Forward timeline.__ Spacelike. Backward timelike. Here-now. Future. Past. _None of it made a bit of sense to Ginny. She couldn't tell if it did to Draco, either; his face was as blank as ever. Too late, she snatched her half away. He did the same with his. 

"You sneaked up here to listen to them," he said, his voice dangerously soft. 

"I didn't--"

"Did you hear what you wanted to hear?"

Ginny felt the rough stone of the balustrade against her back. 

"Did you understand what they were talking about? You did, didn't you?"

Draco had pushed her all the way along the stone railing, and she flinched at the look in his eyes. "No. I don't know anything, I don't understand anything, I don't-- let _go_ of me, Malfoy!" Ginny gave a wild, uncoordinated leap away from him, and fell, swinging in space. 

Her legs scrabbled at nothing. Her feet kept striking the lower part of the balcony, trying to find something to stand on, but there was no solid surface. Draco was still holding her by the wrists, and for a wild instant Ginny was absolutely sure he was going to let go. 

But then he was pulling her up, she was clutching at the stone, his arms were hauling her over the edge, and she was landing on blessed solid ground. Ginny wobbled against him, too weak to walk or even stand. She could feel that she was leaning against Malfoy completely,, but she was too dazed to care. Her heart was thumping so hard that she was sure it would burst out of her chest any moment. "You _are _clumsy, aren't you, Weasley?" she heard him saying, but she didn't care about that either. 

When she came to herself again, she was sitting on the stone bench of the balcony, and her head was in a lap of warm, soft robes. A hand was holding a cup of punch to her lips. She grimaced at the taste. It was pretty much pure Old Ogden's Firewhisky by this point. "Where'd that come from?" she asked in a croak. 

"Someone left it here, I suppose," replied a voice. She shook her head, opening her eyes fully, and recognized Draco Malfoy. 

"You-- ooh." She tried to sit up, but her head spun so violently that she dropped back down again. 

"I've never driven a girl to attempted suicide before," he said thoughtfully. "I don't know whether to feel flattered or insulted."

"I hate you," she said weakly. 

"Gratitude is what most people would express after having their lives saved, but, apparently owing to a lack of ready cash in the Weasley household for etiquette lessons--"

"I wouldn't have slipped if you hadn't been forcing me off the balcony in the first place!" 

"That was a bit more than a slip."

He was right. Ginny closed her eyes. Deep within, she wondered if a small part of her had wanted to jump, after all. "Thanks," she said stonily. "I suppose this means that I owe you one."

"Perhaps."

"What do you want me to do? Let's get it over with."

Draco's eyes swept her form-fitting robes, lingering a bit longer than strictly necessary on the strategically located tear the rough stone rail had made in the bodice. "Let me think about it. We'll discuss-- _payment-_- later."

"Oh! You really are disgusting, Malfoy." She struggled to a half-sitting position and could go no further. Her head fell back against his chest and little as she liked the position, Ginny was forced to hold it for the moment. 

The air didn't feel nearly so cold now, with someone next to her.Of course, that was just because it was another carbon-based warm-blooded form of life. She still despised Draco Malfoy as much as ever. 

And she was afraid that some inexplicable thing had suffered a sea-change between them. Changed in the space of a breath, of a few heartbeats. All because he had saved her life.

Ginny took a deep breath. She should leave immediately. She needed to get back down to the gardens. She had to return to where they were all looking for her. Where her brother would say reproachful things, Hermione would sniff, Neville would take her stiff hand in his clammy one, and Harry would avoid her hungry eyes. 

Even sitting next to Malfoy suddenly seemed preferable to that. 

He was silent as well. They both sat like stone statues. His arms were still around her waist. She could hear his heartbeat, strong and fast under the soft robes. It was a moment out of time, out of reality, out of all the enmity that had ever been between him and her. 

Across the lake, the tower clock chimed the carillon. 

"It's almost midnight," Draco said. 

"Yes." Ginny remembered how she'd dreamed of this time, when the clock struck midnight at the Yule Ball. Back when she thought that surely Harry would ask her _this _year. She'd imagined them under a sprig of mistletoe in some secluded corner of the garden. And he'd kiss her. But it was not to be, never to be. 

The clock whirred. Draco moved his hand up, under her chin, and tipped it up to his face. 

The clock struck. And his lips came down on hers. 

For a second, Ginny was frozen with shock. But it was nothing like she'd imagined a kiss from Draco Malfoy might be (not, of course, that she'd ever spent even a millisecond imagining such a thing, oh no.) That was her undoing. If it had been violent and demanding, she would have had no trouble breaking it and pushing him off her. But it wasn't. It was as gentle as the soft brush of a pheonix feather against her mouth. And she was the one who put her hands on either side of his head and felt his soft hair on her fingertips and kissed him back, kissed him with all the wild hunger and anger and pent-up frustration in her. 

The clock struck six. She heard him groan under her. His hands moved her back against the bench so that they shifted positions and she was under him, bent so that her hair brushed the stone, his lips were everywhere on her bare skin and she heard herself moaning, now--

The clock struck eight. He pulled her up to him, easing a green satin strap off her shoulder, his mouth moving down further. She arched her back and cried out something, whether a word, a name, or simply a sound, she never knew. Her hands clutched at his back and she felt the spare strong muscles under her fingers--

The clock struck ten. She opened her mouth for him as far as it would go and he was devouring her; she gave herself up to him entirely, the blood in her veins had been replaced by boiling, thick honey; there was a mist before her eyes, something bright flashed across her retinas but she scarcely saw it; all her senses had been reduced to the feel on his hands and mouth on her--

The clock struck twelve. The last low, booming toll faded away. Sensation came back to her. 

She was half-sitting, half-lying on a stone bench, a cold wind blowing over her half-naked chest. Her legs were sprawled awkwardly apart. Kneeling between them was Draco Malfoy, who was pulling down her robes from the top. 

"Get off me!" She made her hands into fists and pounded them on his back. 

"What?" he muttered, looking up, his silvery eyes unfocussed. 

"OFF!" Oh God, he was smirking at her, and his mouth was smeared with her coral lipstick. 

"I do believe we've found a way for you to pay me back."

"Stop it!"

"Weasley, we've barely even begun," he said in a purr. "Of course, it_ is_ rather cold out here, isn't it? Fancy coming back to my room? It's quite private-- well, there's Blaise Zabini, but we can always put a Silencing charm on the bedcurtains-- or not, if you like, Blaise _is_ quite the voyeur, you know--" 

"I'm going to be sick. I mean it. I really am. Oh God, what's wrong with me?"

"Nothing that a good shag wouldn't cure," drawled Draco. "You've been a virgin too long, Ginny. That's your problem. Or are you one?" He lifted an eyebrow at her. 

"You'll never know!" She tried to snatch her hand away as he reached out for her wrist, but Draco was too fast for her. "Don't, I don't want you touching me!" Her voice rose almost to a screech. 

"That's not the way it seemed thirty seconds ago." 

Ginny struggled with him for a moment, her teeth set. Her hair tumbled down around her face and she could feel the tears threatening to spill over her eyelashes, but she was determined not to cry in front of Draco Malfoy. He held her arm easily, his face amused. "Just let go of me. I mean it," she said. 

"Your lips may say no, but your eyes say yes." His voice mocked her. He was pulling her back down on the bench.

With one wild surge of strength, she yanked away from him. She drew her arm back and slapped his elegant patrician face with all her strength. The sound was like a crack of thunder. He put a hand to his cheek, which was marked by a perfect red imprint of her hand. "Ah," was all he said. She stared at him in horror, and then turned and ran blindly down the staircase. 

A/N: Ah yes, a cliffhanger. Mwah ha. Review! Review! Pretty please. 


	3. Draco's Prayer

Chapter Three: Draco's Prayer

A/N: If you recognize it, it's JKR's; if you don't, it's mine, or it's historical fact. The German was checked and fixed by a German beta! Thanks Irina! The rest is Sally, my British beta. Unfortunately, once the French shows up—and it will, ooh la la-- there is no French beta. 

Draco sat for a long time, long after the last echoes of Ginny's footsteps had died away. His eyes ached from staring and from too little sleep. Night after night after night, rolled over onto his back and staring up into the dark green velvet hangings of his bed. Letting time, thought, sensation slip away from him, bit by bit by bit. It never quite worked, though, not completely. His mind always began racing in the same old circles. Just as it was doing now. Remembering that past summer, the last few tortured weeks he'd spent at home after the blessed months in Bavaria. His mother had stayed behind in Linz, refused to return to England. She'd begged him to stay with her. But he had not. Damn Ginny Weasley..._ goddamn her._.. she'd stripped some obscure mental armor away from him and left him dazed and vulnerable to those memories. They rushed through his head like a dark sea. 

The long bleak corridors of Malfoy Manor, the winding wooden staircases, the always-closed door to his father's study. The strange fascination of that closed door. Knowing that behind it, Lucius Malfoy was slumped in a vast leather chair, clutching a snifter of brandy and muttering to himself. Every so often he would steal out, unshaven and wild-eyed, and always, always in the deepest part of the night. But that was when Draco sometimes roamed those halls, too. It was always when he had finally given up on the sleep that evaded him. And then father and son would meet, each knowing that they were driven by their own private obsessions. Each haunted in a different way; Lucius by what had been, and Draco by what now would never be. By the power that had twisted both their lives and then vanished, leaving nothing to replace it. The shade of Lord Voldemort. 

Draco looked out into the darkness and wondered in a detached sort of way if Ginny Weasley had had the right idea, going over the balustrade like that. 

He clenched his hands together over the rough stone at the edge. "All I want is an answer," he said. "Just some sort of answer, or clue, or sign, to tell me what the_ hell _I should be doing--" Draco realized that he was speaking aloud. "Uh-- God?"

No answer. No wonder. How inappropriate. 

"Satan?"

Still nothing. 

_Muggle mythology.__ Fails you every time. _

_"_Wotan? Donar? Loki?" The names of the Teutonic gods of his mother's people came to his lips, and fell through the cold air as flatly as the rest. They were all dead as dust, crumbling stone images in long-abandoned churches. There was no-one to help him, no-one to offer him a word of advice or comfort, and no-one to stay his hand from his own destruction.

The night seemed to stand still, holding its breath. Waiting for what he would decide. 

As he stood, he heard the beating of wings. A great eagle owl settled itself on the stone rail. "Aquila," he said. "Gods, when was the last time I saw you?" Draco couldn't remember if his father had sent him a single letter throughout the entire fall term. Not since... well, he wouldn't think of that. Wouldn't remember that last thing that had happened in the deepest dungeon of Malfoy Manor before he went back to Hogwarts for fall term. Narcissa had sent a few scrolls by the great von Drachen raven, Vogelfrei. But she was an indifferent writer, and her command of the written English language had never been good. He stroked the owl's feathered back, and it nipped at his finger gently. He unrolled the parchment tied to its leg. 

It was his father's writing, the long, bold, black strokes. It was in his father's style, the terse, cold sentences, each one clipped and separated from all the rest. The words swam before Draco's eyes. He forced himself to read them.

_Draco,_

_You will be pleased to learn that our efforts have borne fruit at last. There is a new hope. He whom we seek is close at hand. Time is of the essence. I will write no more now, but go to the high belfry of the Hogwarts clock tower as soon as you have received this letter. Aquila will lead the way._

The paper disintegrated in Draco's hands as he read the signature. _Lucius M--_ hovered in the air, and then crumbled into dust. 

He turned on his heel and went down the stairs, forcing himself to move slowly. It had come. It had come at last. _The_ letter. The one he'd so often dreamed of, waking with a cry, whether of gladness or horror he was never quite sure. But he wanted it, of course. Wanted it more than anything else in the world. A vast dark excitement bloomed inside his head. Draco forced himself to keep it in check; he still didn't know, not really. But he did know. He had never truly believed that this moment would come, never, and oh, how he winced at that now, how he hoped that they wouldn't hold it against him. Not now, when against all odds the longed-for dream might at last be within his grasp. "Let him trust me... oh, please," he murmured, knowing that his words were a prayer to whatever gods might be. "Let me become what I was meant to be, born to be..."

A few minutes later, the bushes at the back of the balcony rustled. Colin Creevey stepped out. His knuckles had gone white from clutching his Hasselblad to his chest. The counter in the little window of his camera read thirty-six, a fully exposed roll of film. "That's_ odd_," he muttered, shakily picking his way down the staircase. "I _know_ I didn't take that many."

As Draco hurried across the lawns towards the clock tower, he caught a glimpse of red hair out of the corner of his eye. _Ginny Weasley._ The memory of his madness with her flashed across his mind. She was standing next to her brother and Granger at the edge of the gardens, arguing with them, seemingly, shaking a finger in their faces. The front of her bodice was still torn; he would have thought that she would have used a _Sutura _charm on it by now. But maybe she hadn't noticed it yet. Even in a quick glance he could see the red marks on her neck and chest. He smirked. How _would_ she explain those to that damn overprotective brother of hers? Those marks that he'd made... and, touching his cheek, Draco remembered the mark that she'd left on him. 

More than one girl turned to look at the slim, graceful figure of Draco Malfoy walking away from the castle with the eagle owl perched on his wrist. But those who saw the cruel smile on his handsome face flinched back, their eyes wide. Some of them woke screaming from the dreams that racked their sleep that night. For Draco smiled as he thought of the future, and of the past. And, of course, of what he'd do to his enemies, once they were entirely powerless and defeated. Particularly Ginny Weasley. 

The sort of insult she'd dealt him could not be allowed to go unpunished. 

Perhaps, at the end of all things, he'd ask that she be spared. 

So that he could deal with her himself. 

The door of the clock tower was locked. Draco had expected that, and he slipped his wand from its holster to point at the elaborately carved keyhole, saying "_Alohamora_" in a low voice. He rattled the knob._ Still locked._ He moved the wand in a figure eight, and faint sparks followed its motion in the air. "_Apertus_." Nothing_.__ Patefacio, Patens... all nothing._ The door remained locked. 

Draco rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Then he traced the tip of his wand directly over the keyhole itself, murmuring the words of a Revealing charm, and the metal glowed an opaque blue. The door could only be opened by a key, not by a spell. Was something as simple as this really going to stop him? He peered through a crack in the door, not sure what he was looking for, hoping for some clue. Moonlight spilling through a high window lit the interior of the tower. It was empty and abandoned. Rusting machinery was piled on the dirt floor, and Draco could see what looked like the fallen ruin of a wooden staircase. But what he saw was impossible, because the tower clock _did _work, did strike the hour as it was supposed to do. How could this be?

Even as the thought crossed his mind, he felt a cold presence at his back, something draining energy from the very air. A tall, gaunt figure covered in silvery stains, lantern-jawed, silent. It was the Bloody Baron. Draco couldn't help jumping a little; even Peeves the Poltergeist was afraid of this ghost, who seemed to suck happiness from the very air as effectively as any dementor. Then the Baron did something that was, as far as Draco had ever heard, unprecedented. 

He opened his mouth and spoke. 

"_Hast du das Juwel_?"

"I didn't know you could talk," Draco said stupidly. 

The Baron was silent. 

"Don't you speak English? That's it, isn't it? That's why you never say anything." Then Draco realized that if the Baron didn't speak English, then he probably hadn't understood a word of what he himself had said. 

"_Hast du das Juwel_?" the ghost repeated, a glum, hopeless look upon his face. 

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said. The ghost began to move away, and with it Draco saw his one, slim, faint hope of getting into the tower vanish. There was a ring of keys at the Baron's belt. "No! Wait! I think I understood what you said-- you asked if I had a jewel-- but I don't know what you mean, er... _Ich möchte in den Aufsatz gehen, bitte, bitte!_ " _Damn_. For once, he devoutly wished that Hogwarts taught Muggle languages. He was fairly certain that he'd just begged to be let in the tower, but he might also have been asking to borrow the pen of his aunt. 

The ghost nodded and gave a long sigh. He bent to the keyhole, his translucent shoes just brushing the grass. He took out a curiously carved key and rattled it in the lock, first to the left, then to the right, then back again in a kind of dance. The door swung open. Now, Draco could see a long, winding staircase leading up into shadowed half-darkness. Aquila hooted on his arm, and he moved forward, then stopped. A strange reluctance had overtaken him, and he did not know its source. 

The Baron regarded him somberly, as if bearing the weight of the world on his spectral shoulders. "_Geh, jugend Draco.Geh zum Schicksal für dich ernannt."_

"Go to the place-- no, to the doom appointed for me?" Draco echoed, unconsciously translating the ghost's words. "But what's that? Can't you tell me?"

_"Weil das Wild das du jägst, das ist der Tod_," the Baron said. 

"For the quarry that I seek is _death_-- What the hell does_ that _mean?"

The Baron was silent. 

"Why'd you tell me anything, if it was just going to be a load of rubbish that doesn't make any sense?" Draco demanded. He remembered that the Baron didn't understand what he said. His own meager command of spoken German seemed to have lapsed almost entirely. There was no room left for anything in his head except the desperate need to get to the top of the tower. "Thanks for unlocking the door. I mean, ah, _vielen dank,_" he said awkwardly, and Draco started running up the winding tower stair. Maybe it was in the nature of ghosts to say only cryptic things. Behind him, the Baron shook his head sadly and vanished into the grass. 

Draco paused at the very top of the tower, in the belfry. The grounds of Hogwarts were spread out below him when he looked west, and the clock's mainspring whirred before him. To the east was the vast Forbidden Forest, blacker than the night. "_Lumos_," he whispered, and his wand cast eerie shadows on the moving clockwork wheels mounted on the interior face of the clock itself. "_Now_ what?" 

He had a sudden, hideous stab of fear that the letter had only been another piece of Lucius Malfoy's deepening madness. _Might as well just say the word_, Draco thought. _That's what it is. God knows I saw enough of it. _He waited, the sound of his own breathing oddly magnified in the tiny tower room. He was standing on a wooden plank floor. Some of the clockworks were in the middle of it on a platform, and long poles attached them to the rest of the wheels and springs on the clockface. The floor itself was actually a platform, he saw. All round it, there was only darkness, and he guessed that the drop went all the way down to ground level. The minutes ticked by. After a time that seemed interminable, the carillon chimed, and the works gave that faint rustling sound that meant the clock was about to strike the hour. Aquila leaped from his wrist. Draco jumped back, badly startled. But then he saw where the bird was going. 

Without hesitation, the eagle owl flew directly into the inside face of the clock. The air where it had been wavered. The Roman numerals, seen from the wrong way, twisted and then righted themselves. Aquila was gone. Draco blinked. 

_Aquila__ will lead the way._

But surely that couldn't mean that _he_ was supposed to do the same thing? He couldn't have actually just seen an owl fly through a clock. Aquila had probably pulled up at the last minute and flown up to roost in the rafters. If Draco tried that trick, he'd crash into the clockface and fall to his death. _Maybe that's what the Bloody Baron meant. _

_Ah, but wasn't that what you were considering an hour ago anyway?_

No._.. _Draco shook his head vehemently... _no_. That sort of thing was for weak fools. And if he could truly trust what he'd read in that letter, he had so much to live for now. So very much. 

_But then you must trust what it says. And do what it told you to do. Would you disobey the very first order given to you? Refuse the very first action asked of you? He who would command, must first obey..._

As he stood, irresolute, the great bell began to toll. The sound was unbearably loud. It must be one o'clock, so there would be only the one. It was now, or never. 

Taking a deep breath, Draco half-walked, half-ran forward, launching himself at the glowing clockface in a leap. He only had time to see the wooden planks of the floor fall away beneath his feet into darkness. Then he knew no more. 

A/N: Ahaha. An evil cliffie. ;) Review!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And remember to leave your email address if you want to be on the mailing list. 

A/N: Review! Review! Please say in your review if you want to be on the superspecial mailing list! 


	4. Ginny's Awakening

Chapter Four: Ginny's Awakening. 

A/N: 

Thanks to LadyJade, GryffindorGirl2002, Julianka,StarEyes, VirtualFaerie, Allie, VioletJersey, Catalina Royce, Supergirl, and all the reviewers! If you recognize it as JKR's, it's hers; if you don't, it's mine or historical fact. The reason this is getting updated so fast is that this is a slightly altered and improved version of what's up on fictionalley. However, after about 6 more chapters I'm going to run out of what I've already got up there, and then it'll slow down some (although I still like to update every couple of weeks.) Ah, you should know that this will, indeed, be every little bit as long as GoF by the time it's done, and I ain't kidding. That's how I write. I've done it before and I'll do it again. BTW. I may do fan art for this story someday, but until that happy time comes (not until Christmas vacation at the earliest, probably) my mental image of _Jewel's _Draco is pretty close to a very young Edward Norton (_American X,_ _Fight Club, Red Dragon_, etc.), with very blond hair. ;) I can't link to pics from here, so watch the movies. Contains NotAsCluelessAsHeUsedToBe!Harry and SoScary!Colin. More dark things happen and are remembered. 

8:00 p.m.: Hogwarts

Ginny heard a jumble of indistinct murmurs in the darkness beyond her closed eyes. She kept them shut, slowly returning to consciousness, not wanting to be yanked back into the world just yet. She felt weak and dizzy, and her head was pounding. Then, like the Muggle shortwave radio that had so fascinated Arthur Weasley that summer, the voices tuned in. They were very soft. Or at least they should have been. Each syllable seemed to have a buzzing, harsh sound that grated weirdly on her ear. 

"Wish Neville would get back." That was Ron's voice. It was followed by a loud swishing noise.

"So do I. I hate not knowing what's happening." And surely that was Hermione. Another swish, loud and irritating. Ginny raised her eyelids a crack. It felt as if five-kilo weights were attached to each one. Her brother and her friend were bent over a wizard's chess board, Hermione's hair brushing the pieces. A white knight spluttered and waved his tiny arms. 

"Are you going to play another game, or not?" the black queen asked waspishly. 

Hermione shook her head, and several pieces went flying. She picked them up absently. 

"Don't wrinkle the material, if you don't mind," said the white king, straightening his minute robes. 

"Shut it," muttered Ron. 

There was a beat of silence. 

Then Ron spoke again, and before he'd even gotten to the end of the sentence Ginny recognized that particular tone in his voice. It was the same one he'd had the summer he was ten. When he'd spent three months doing nothing but plotting morning, noon, and night how to get back at the neighborhood bully, who'd stolen Ginny's new bicycle.

"I'll bet it was Malfoy," he said. 

"Ron, you might try being reasonable. That's all you've been saying all afternoon long." That was Hermione, sounding quite aggravated. Footsteps moved around the side of the bed. Now it sounded as if they were both sitting down next to her.

"Why won't you listen to me? You know I'm right," said Ron. His voice was closer to Ginny now, very nearly in her ear. 

"I don't know any such thing. You're not thinking logically." Hermione sighed. 

"I'm thinking perfectly log--"

"Let's go over this again. One. Madam Pomfrey said that it had to have been given to her at some point during the Yule Ball, last night. Probably more than once. Maybe even later, but she wasn't sure about that."

"That's what I've been trying to say. Why can't you--"

"Two," continued Hermione. "Ginny was with Neville all night long. And I certainly hope you don't start in next with expecting me to believe that _Neville_ did it."

"Of course I won't. But what you said's wrong, and you know it, Hermione," continued Ron, sounding as if he were speaking through clenched teeth. "We don't know where she ran off to after she got so upset." 

"As I've told you repeatedly, Ron, you're reasoning from faulty premises," said Hermione in her most irritating tone. Ron growled something incomprehensible in reply. "We may not know where she went or who she was with, but it's just plain ridiculous for you to assume it was Malfoy."

"What!" yelped Ron. "I'm not assuming my sister was_ with_ Malfoy, as you put it! If I really thought that, I'd be pounding his rat face into the ground right now."

"You'd be doing well to find him," said Hermione. "Nobody knows where he is."

"I know. I wonder what that means. D'you suppose Moody knows? Hey-- wait a sec-- you're trying to distract me. It isn't going to work."

"I wasn't trying to distract you, Ron. I was trying to do some actual thinking, which seems to be in short supply in this room at the moment." 

""I may be harboring plans for hideous revenge, but I _am_ thinking," said Ron in his most hurt tones. 

"I suppose it's possible," Hermione said dryly." But you've left one rather important thing out, Ron."

"What?"

"Motive. Why on earth would Malfoy do such a thing?"

Ron snorted. "Oh, you really think he'd be too noble for that?"

"Of course I don't. But it's a serious offense and he would have got into a lot of trouble if he was caught. Why should he take the risk? What's in it for him?"

"How do I know! Because he's an evil git."

"That's not a good enough reason, Ron. People have been sent to Azkaban for it."

"All right, how's this. Because he thought she knew something about what we're doing. And would tell him."

"I can't believe that," Hermione said flatly. "This doesn't work like a Veritaserum. The victim doesn't simply pour out every secret she knows. She has to _want_ to tell--" She stopped, cutting off her own words. 

There was a tentative knock at the door, and a creak as it was pushed open. "Sorry," said a muffled voice that Ginny couldn't quite place. "I'm sorry-- I see she's not_ up_ yet--" 

"Oh! No, _I'm_ so sorry," Hermione was saying. "So terribly sorry. Are you going to be all right?"

"Yes," said the muffled voice. "Madam Pomfrey fixed my nose already."

"Look, I'm sure that Ginny will be sorry as well," Hermione continued. "Once she's-- er-- herself again."

"It's all right," said the muffled voice. "Please don't think I hold anything against her. I _understand_." There was something familiar about that voice. Horribly familiar. Ginny opened one eye just the tiniest crack. 

Colin Creevey was standing in the doorway, holding his heavily bandaged nose. "I heard about what--" He stopped. "She'll need all your love and support," he said in his most oily, unctuous voice, spoiled somewhat by the fact that he sounded as if he had a dreadful head cold. Ginny had a sudden impulse to leap out of bed and punch him again. "She'll be vulnerable... hurt... angry..." Well, he was right about that last one. 

"She _is _going to be all right, isn't she?" Colin asked. Ginny squeezed her eyes shut so tightly that she thought, for a panicked instant, that someone would surely notice. 

"Yes, Madam Pomfrey says she will," said Ron's voice from very close to Ginny's ear. She felt his weight shift and guessed he must be sitting on her bed. _Madam Pomfrey. _So she was in the hospital wing. 

Colin's footsteps came closer. "Do they have any idea who did it?"

"Not really," said Harry. Ginny nearly jumped at that; it was the first time he'd spoken, and she hadn't realized he was even in the room. 

"Listen," said Colin, "I-- I came because I felt bad about something."

"You don't need to feel bad about anything," Hermione said in warm, sympathetic tones. 

"Oh, but I _do_. It's-- it's something I saw."

Ron stood up very quickly; Ginny could feel the sudden loss of his weight on the bed next to her. 

"On the night of the Yule Ball. And I didn't tell anybody. And now I'm thinking that I should've," said Colin. 

"If you have something to say, please say it, Colin," said Harry in a strangely distant voice. 

"Well, I saw Ginny run off and I went after her. I thought maybe I could help to calm her down a bit-- she seemed so _emotional_ that night, didn't she? She went all the way up to the north tower and I followed her, but she was so _upset_; I didn't know if I should let her know I was _there_ just yet."

Ginny felt drops of ice water begin to cascade down her spine. 

"I'm awfully ashamed I didn't say anything _then_," said Colin in a whine. "But he's broken three of my cameras already and this Hasselblad is _brand_ new, and--"

"Who?" asked Ron in a very level voice. 

"Malfoy."

Quick, heavy footsteps crossed the room. "Tell me absolutely everything you saw right this instant," growled her brother. 

There was a pause, just a millisecond longer than it should have been. Then Colin spoke again. "I really didn't see anything. Ginny was standing next to the balcony and looking out over the grounds. Draco Malfoy came up next to her and said something, I don't know what it was. They both stood there for a moment, and then he left." Ginny dared to open an eyelid slightly. She saw that Colin was looking at Harry, Ron, and Hermione hopefully, like a dog who has successfully performed a trick and now expects a biscuit. A dog with a servile grin on its face and rabies frothing behind its razor-sharp teeth.

"There's got to be more. Think!" Ron barked so sharply that Ginny's hands clutched at a fold of her robes, involuntarily.

"There was one other thing!" said Colin in a stricken sort of voice. 

Ron drew his breath in with a hiss. "I knew it. I knew it. What else?" 

"I_ don't _really think I should--"

"Tell me."

"But you don't _want_ to know," said Colin. 

"The hell I don't!" There were two or three heavy strides across the floor and then the unmistakable sound of someone being grabbed by the collar and shaken ferociously; Hermione was screaming and beating at Ron with her fists. 

"Stop it! You can't do this, Ron, you know you can't; he's only trying to help!"

"He'd better tell me what he knows then," said Ron, but he let Hermione drag him off Colin. 

"He was--" said Colin, panting for breath, "Malfoy, he-- he grabbed your sister. Ginny tried to fight him off, but he was too strong for her."

"What. Happened. Then," asked Ron, each word as flat as if it had been stamped out by machine. 

"I started running up the stairs as fast as I could once I saw that. But before I got there, well, he had her backed up against the balcony and he was, er, lifting her robes up--" Colin moved out of Ron's reach slightly, but the other boy was simply staring at him, face utterly expressionless. "He leaned forward too far and she kneed him in the groin. Malfoy sort of collapsed on the floor. Then he staggered up and ran down the stairs. Look, I'm not _proud _of how I behaved, not at _all_, but--"

"Don't worry about it," Ron said distantly. "Sorry about a minute ago." 

"But there's something _else_. There was a glass of punch sitting on the balustrade, and she picked it up and drank from it." 

"How did it get there?" Ron asked, as if enquiring after the point spread on the Chudley Cannons for next Sunday's Quidditch game.

"Malfoy, uh, set it down before he started to..."

"I see," said Ron. "I see."

"Right. I'll, er, just be going then, I suppose." Colin paused another moment; Ron, Harry, and Hermione stared back at him with expressionless faces. "I'm awfully sorry I was the one to tell you," he said, and at last he left. Just before the door closed, he turned back towards Ginny. One of this eyelids closed in a wink. The sound of the door falling shut died away. 

"Wonder how I'll kill him," said Ron in the same toneless voice.

"There's a Muggle saying, you know," said Hermione. "'Don't shoot the messenger.'"

"You know perfectly well I'm not talking about Colin," Ron said in a calm, thoughtful way. 

Hermione looked at him narrowly, but obviously came to the decision that he sounded far too unemotional to present any danger. Ginny almost sat up to tell her friend that alternating between passionate snogging sessions and furious fighting didn't give her the sort of understanding of Ron that she needed just then. Ginny knew her brother had a fiery, hair-trigger temper; all the Weasleys did. But nearly sixteen years as his sister had taught her something else, too. Ron wasn't really dangerous when he ranted and raved and kicked at walls, but rather when his voice took on that utterly flat sound, and his eyes became blank and his face smooth. These thing meant that he was completely consumed by homicidal rage.

_"_I don't think a wand is going to give me what I need," continued Ron, as if pondering a choice between chocolate and vanilla pudding at dinner. "I really think I'll have to see his blood all over the floor. That pure blood the Malfoys are so proud of."

"Ron, you're scaring me," said Hermione in a very small voice. "Please stop. There's law. There's justice in the courts."

"With Lucius Malfoy having the Ministry of Magic in his pocket?" asked Ron. "I don't think so." Ginny opened one eye almost all the way and saw Ron pick up his backpack from the floor. "Right then, when's the last train?"

"To where?" asked Hermione in the cautious tones normally reserved for speaking to criminally deranged lunatics. 

"Kent," Ron said. 

"To do what?" 

"If I wear Muggle clothing, I think I could get into Malfoy Manor all right... pose as a servant or something... Fred's got some blue jeans I could borrow," said Ron. "Then I'm going to find Draco Malfoy and beat the shit out of him and leave him lying on the floor in a bloody pulp." 

"Er, Ron," said Harry, turning from the window. 

"Wish you could come with me, Harry. I'll bet they've got detection spells covering a ten-metre radius of the place against you, though. But I'm a lowly Weasley, dirt under their feet, not even worth hating; who would suspect me?"

Harry came forward. His green eyes were very brilliant, and his face was very grave. "Ron. I really think you should stop it." 

"Oh, so you're singing that song, too?" Ron whirled on his friend, and for the first time Ginny saw the hurt and misery beneath his deadly calm facade. "You don't know what this is like! You've never had a sister, never will have one."

"That's true," Harry agreed. "I'll never know what it's like, what you're feeling now, but--" 

"So you'll never know why I have to do this."

"Do what?" Harry stepped deliberately closer to his best friend. "Throw it all away in a stupid gesture so that you're not there for Ginny when she needs you?"

Hermione was standing in the corner, twisting her hands. "Oh, please don't," she whimpered, but there was no way to tell who she was speaking to. 

"Ginny needs you now," said Harry. "She's going to need you more than ever, after what happened to her." He was only speaking about her, not to her; still, Ginny drank in the sound of Harry's words. He never, never spoke this way when she was around, with such adult seriousness in his voice. No, he always treated her with-- well, to be honest, with a sort of kindly condescension. Ginny's mind shied away from that thought. But she knew that something complex and adult was there, or potentially there, always lurking beneath the surface of Harry Potter. In the two years since the horrible events of the Triwizard Tournament, he'd lost a lot of his awkward adolescent cluelessness. That had been cute crush fodder. What he was now-- As always when she thought about what he was now, Ginny shivered with hapless desire and hopeless love. 

Ron sank back onto the bed. "D'you know what my first real memory is, Harry?"

The other boy shook his head. 

"I was about five years old, I suppose. Ginny and I were playing in that little park near our house." Ron's voice took on a dreamy, vague quality. "There was a slide, and a swingset... but the neighborhood bully didn't like to let the other children use them. Ginny was just four. She tried to get on the little merry-go-round they had, she liked the way it went round and round, and she'd get dizzy... And I was showing off for some of the Muggle kids, hanging by my knees upside down on the monkey bars. I heard her scream. The bully had pushed her down. Blood was pouring out of her nose, and her little face... I never forgot the way it looked, so full of pain and fear, and something more, like the world had turned and slapped her and she'd never trust it again... Mum was sitting on a park bench with her knitting, and she rushed over and gathered Ginny up. I've never forgotten the look on her face when she turned to me. Like nothing else in the world could ever disappoint her that much. 'I told you to take care of your sister,' was all she said. I never forgot it. And I always have, you know, Harry. I've always, always taken care of Ginny." Ron's eyes were wet with tears, and Harry looked away for a moment, letting his friend collect himself. Ginny had closed her eyes again, and felt tears prickle behind them, too. 

"Ron," Harry said so quietly that Ginny could barely hear his words, "you can't go hunting down Draco Malfoy."

"And why not?" Ron tried to hide his sniffs behind his cupped hand. 

"It's suicidally stupid, for one thing. They're Death Eaters; think of the sort of protection they must have around their lands. But it's more than that."

"Yeah? What?"

"I don't know," said Harry. "I wish I did. But there's something about what Colin said that's-- well, just not right. That doesn't fit together."

Ron looked at Harry with a little more interest. "You think so?"

"I do." Harry said firmly. 

The door creaked open. Neville stepped in, his face red and flustered. This was, of course, his usual state, but there seemed to be a greater-than-usual undercurrent of desperation to it today. Harry and Ron both turned towards him. 

"What is it?" Harry asked quickly. 

"The book's gone," Neville burst out. 

"Gone?"

"Disappeared! Vanished! He can't find it, and we figured out that there was a Breaking spell used on the lock of the office door!" 

"The-- oh God, the book, Moody's book! The kitty-- no, what's it called, I can never remember the name," said Ron. 

"The _Kitap- an Düs_," said Harry. "When?"

"When what?" asked Neville, who looked as if he was having considerable trouble remembering his own name. 

"When was the breaking spell used?"

"I don't know, maybe ten minutes ago. It just happened. I've got to get back, I just had to come and tell you; we're getting things ready--" Neville looked at the bed, his eyes lingering on Ginny. She closed her eyes until there was just the faintest image of Neville's wistful face, fringed by her lashes. "I won't be able to say goodbye to her," he said. "I wanted to say good-bye." He walked slowly to the bed, leaned down, and glanced back pleadingly at Ron, who nodded. Ginny shut her lashes all the way and felt a quick, fleeting kiss on her cheek. Peeping again, she saw Neville turn back to Ron and Harry. "Moody wants you to come down as quick as you can," he said. They both nodded. Hermione was looking out the window and only the back of her head was visible, but she nodded too. 

The door closed. "Do you see what I mean?" Harry asked Ron in a low voice. 

"The thief could have been Malfoy, too," Ron said stubbornly. "Maybe he's been hiding out in the kitchens or something all this time. Maybe he's there right now." 

In answer, Harry reached for something in his satchel and pulled it out, unfolding it with a snap. It was revealed as a large piece of blank parchment. "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good," he said. Ginny was hard put to it not to give a cry of surprise as the castle and grounds of Hogwarts blossomed on the yellowing page. 

"Look," said Harry, his finger on the map. "Here we are in the hospital wing. There's Pansy Parkinson getting on the carriage to the late train--"

"I see you've modified it. Shows more of the grounds now," said Ron, peering at the map. 

"Yes, well, I'll tell you all about it later if you really want to know-- Funny, Pansy just disappeared." Harry gave a slight frown. "That's odd-- anyway, there's Madam Pomfrey moving down the hallway, she'll be in the room any minute, Filch in a first floor corridor, the Bloody Baron drifting about in the dungeons, Colin going upstairs, Ivy Parkinson on the third floor, almost everyone else is gone, and _no_ Draco Malfoy anywhere. Mischief managed." With another tap, Harry folded the map up. 

"Damn," said Ron glumly. "All right, all right._ That _wasn't him. But what about what Colin saw?"

Harry shook his head. "I don't know. But_ we_ don't know almost anything about what's really going on. And it's going to get worse before it gets better. So you can't go mental on me now, Ron." 

"I suppose you're right really," said Ron. "I reckon I went half crazy for a few minutes. It's just-- the _thought_ of that slimy bastard putting his hands on Ginny-- and don't joke about going mental, Harry, not with--"

"I know, Ron, I know."

"I reckon it's the best thing..."

Her brother seemed unable to finish his sentences. Ginny felt something apprehensive begin to stir in the pit of her stomach. 

"I just don't know if I can stand it," Ron whispered. "I won't know anything about what's happening to her. She'll be in good hands, I know, but--"

"There's something else to consider as well." Harry looked at his friend. "We've all sworn-- what we've sworn. And we have to follow through."

Ron nodded reluctantly. Then he glanced up at Hermione, who was still standing against the wall. "You too," he said, walking over to take her hand. It looked unusually stiff in his, and there was a frozen expression on her face. Ginny realized that Hermione had been standing there all during the conversation, shunted out of it. The boys formed a tight circle of two. It simply wasn't large enough for anyone else. 

In the silence that followed, Ginny's mind was full to bursting with everything she had just heard. She tried and tried to force the scraps of conversations into some sort of sense. They eluded her like the last fading pieces of a dream in daylight. But one thought pounded through her head above all the rest. Colin had not told the whole truth to her brother. In fact, he'd lied. He had painted a picture of events on the north tower that put Ginny in a rosy light, the innocent victim of Draco Malfoy's advances. But he had photographs to prove otherwise. Moving ones, no less. Why? _Why_? 

In the middle of the confused turmoil, Ginny felt her eyes snap open. She sighed inwardly. Ready or not, she had to rejoin the outside world. 

A/N: Review! Review! Review! :)


	5. The Kargasa Charm

Chapter Five: The Kargasa Charm. 

A/N: If you recognize it as JKR's, it's hers; if you don't, it's mine or historical fact. The reason this is getting updated so fast is that this is a slightly altered and improved version of what's up on fictionalley. However, after about 6 more chapters I'm going to run out of what I've already got up there, and then it'll slow down some (although I still like to update every couple of weeks.) Thanks to all the reviewers. :)

"Ginny-- you're awake-- we've been so worried--" said Hermione, twisting her hands. "Did you just wake up?"

"Yes, just now," said Ginny. The expression of relief on her brother's face was almost comical. Ron never had been any good at hiding his thoughts. Harry looked at her soberly, tentatively, as if not yet sure if she was friend or foe. Ginny shivered. His full attention, she realized, had never been turned on her before. How ironic, when she'd prayed so desperately for just such an event. Suddenly, fiercely, she wished him as oblivious to her as he'd always been. Those green eyes saw too much. How could_ she_ have never seen that before?

Madam Pomfrey came bustling up. "You shouldn't be awake just yet," she said briskly. She handed Ginny a glass of some clear bubbling liquid. The girl drank it, grimacing. It tasted a lot like chalk dust. The room dimmed a bit from its unbearable brightness after she'd finished it. 

"Miss Granger-- Mr. Weasley-- Mr. Potter." Madam Pomfrey looked pointedly at Ron, Hermione, and Harry.

"Oh! Right," said Ron. "We'll leave you alone then." They all started to leave the room. 

"Wait," said Ginny, frowning. "What time's the last train leaving?"

"Ten," said Hermione. "Just go down to the platform."

"Weren't we going to meet and go together?" asked Ginny. 

Ron and Harry exchanged a fleeting glance, and there was something kindly in their eyes that made Ginny go cold. 

"No, you go on," said Hermione in a strange tone of voice. She walked over to the bed. "Goodbye, Ginny," she whispered, hugging her friend tightly. 

Harry bent down to do the same. Ginny went rigid with shock as she felt his arms around her for the first time in her life. "Be good," he said. He kissed her on the forehead. 

Ron leaned down and gripped his sister to him. His brown eyes were very serious on hers. "'Bye, Gin," he said in an oddly choked voice. "We'll see you soon. Very soon. Give my love to Mum, when-- when you see her." Then they were gone. 

Ginny lay back in bed and shut her mind off from everything she had just heard. Blackness rolled in on her like a tide. When she opened her eyes again, Madam Pomfrey was bending over her. 

"Ginny," the mediwitch said gently, "do you feel quite recovered now?"

"Yes, I suppose so. Can I just go back to my dormitory? I really should pack." Ginny glanced at the Muggle clock on the bedside table. "It's already nine-thirty!" she said in shock. "How did this happen?"

"I... considered it advisable to put you under a sleeping potion for a bit longer," said Madam Pomfrey. "A suitcase has been packed for you."

Ginny looked down, picking at the edge of the blanket. "What happened?" 

Madam Pomfrey gave a long, long sigh. "I'm bound to be given an earful about this," the mediwitch muttered under her breath. 

"Please, Madam Pomfrey, I-the last thing I remember was fainting in Professor Trelawney's office, and then waking up here. I need to know."

"But I believe that the patient's right to understand her medical condition outweighs any such consideration," the older woman continued as if she hadn't heard. "I always have, and I always will. Regardless of any investigation that may occur." 

"An-- investigation?" Ginny echoed. 

Madam Pomfrey seemed to come to a decision. "Miss Weasley, are you familiar with the Imperius Curse?"

"Yes, we learned about it in our Defense Against the Dark Arts class this term." Ginny didn't add that she'd never done very well in that class, since Professor Moody always seemed to be watching her with his rolling magical eye. His grim face, which always looked as if it had been crudely carved from a block of wood that had been left out in the rain for months on end, seemed to be turned towards her a good deal more than was necessary. By September, she'd been growing nervous, dropping things, and jumping if spoken to in that class. 

The mediwitch nodded. "Yes, they're putting it a bit later in the curriculum than they did, I believe. What you may not have yet learned, since it's taught in the spring term of fifth year if I recall correctly, is that it is only one in a series of curses of its type. The curse you were exposed to during your first year at Hogwarts is another, for example."

Ginny looked down at the floor. That was all she needed-- to be reminded of the diary right now. She pressed her eyes tightly closed for a moment, wishing she could lie down for weeks on end in the darkest, quietest room in the world. 

"All of these curses have one thing in common. They strike at the free will of their victims, eroding or completely destroying their power of choice. Imperius is the best known, of course. But there's one that is perhaps even more dangerous. It's adminstered in a potion, so it's very easy to use. It has no taste, no odor. Its victims rarely know that they have been dosed. It is called the _Disinhibio_ potion." The mediwitch's face looked very tired, Ginny now saw. "I had hoped that no student at this school was capable of using it against another person. But someone has."

"That's what I drank, isn't it," whispered Ginny. 

Madam Pomfrey nodded. "Its effects are more subtle than Imperius or Veritaserum. Which is why it isn't considered an Unforgiveable Curse. But in some ways it may be even worse."

"How does it work?"

"By removing all inhibitions from the victim's mind. He or she acts in a way bounded only by their impulses and hidden desires. In a way, I suppose you might say that it reveals one's true personality. But there are reasons why we don't take every action that crosses our minds, or obey every impulse we feel." Madam Pomfrey leaned closer. "For example, you might have a fleeting thought about someone who happened to annoy you -- 'I wish that person were dead.' In the normal way, that idea might occur to you, but you would never act on it. Under the _Disinhibio_ potion, however, you would. And unlike Imperius, it has lasting effects."

"I don't understand," whispered Ginny. 

"No-one does, dear, no-one does..." Madam Pomfrey sighed. "There's never been a properly controlled study, you see. Only anecdotes. Some have claimed that it gives the victim extraordinary powers of perception, or skills at divination; I'd be inclined to doubt that one, myself."

The remembered vision in the tarot cards, in Professor Trelawney's office, flashed through Ginny's mind. 

"Others have claimed that physical changes may take place after Disinhibio. Again, I'm rather sceptical, but there was a curious case in Surrey in the fourteenth century in which a girl who'd been dosed was being-- er-- attacked. Severalwitnesses are recorded as having insisted that she turned into a bird and flew away. She was not an Animagus beforehand. The girl was found in a forest quite some distance away, returned to her normal self, and I believe she was perfectly well afterwards. Although the magihistorian writes that she never could abide heights from that day on." Madam Pomfrey caught herself. "But the point, Ginny, is that administration of this potion is a serious matter indeed. Your brother seems to feel that the identity of the perpetrator is quite clear, but without proof--" She hesitated. "I _ must_ ask you. Can you think of anyone-- anyone at all-- who might have a reason to administer this potion to you?"

"I don't know," said Ginny. She did. But her mind was racing, racing through all her options, all avenues of possibility, desperately trying to figure out how much was safe for her to say. 

"Please think about this. Think hard." Madam Pomfrey's tone was almost pleading. "This is a very serious offense, and if we fail to catch the guilty party, he-- or she-- may strike again."

The glass of punch at the table, right after Colin sat down with her and Neville. The glass later on in the high North tower, the one Draco had given her, exactly where she now knew Colin had been watching them. The glass of pumpkin juice Colin had poured for her after knocking over her old one at the breakfast table this morning. 

Oh God. It had been Colin Creevey. 

But _why_?

Ginny blushed slightly, remembering the Astronomy Tower earlier that day. He'd clearly thought that if she could only set aside her shyness and act on her true emotions, she'd jump on him in a mad excess of passion. Little had he known that she'd only punch him in the mouth. But why go to such lengths and take such a risk just to get _her_? Ginny knew she wasn't small and delicate and doll-pretty, like Pansy Parkinson or Xanthia Morgan; she was too tall, her hair was too red and too wild, her features too strong, her breasts embarrassingly large compared to the rest of her; Mum was forever having to haul out the sewing machine and alter her school robes to fit. Her lithe child's body had turned on her in the past two years, gleefully dragging her through a funhouse mirror, making her unrecognizable to herself. 

She looked across the room, dully, and saw her reflection in the mirror on the far wall; the frizzled hair and the frazzled face, the big bags under her golden eyes, the cheekbones too high, the chin too pointed. (_This one should have been a boy_, her father had said. All her brothers got seasick in the punt on the lake outside Ottery St.-Catchpole. But Arthur Weasley told her stories of his days in the Muggle's Royal Navy and slapped her on the back, half-roughly, because she would grow up wasted, a girl.) There was nothing about her to drive any boy to such lengths. Neville liked her because she didn't laugh at him. She'd thrown herself at Draco; his response was no credit to _her_. He probably hadn't even meant anything he said afterwards, had only asked her to do those things because they were nasty and vicious and would make her writhe in embarrassment. (_A tiny part of me wanted to come back to his room with him when he asked but I was drugged, that wasn't me, couldn't have been me-_-) And Colin wanted her because... well, who knew why Colin wanted her. What he had done just seemed sad, sordid, and creepy.

But what if he had done what he'd done for another reason entirely?

What did Colin really want from her? What was it that he thought she knew?

And why, oh God, why had he _winked _at her?

"The effects of repeated doses are unknown," Madam Pomfrey was saying. "I saw your lab work, and I knew that you had received at least two. Ginny, if you know, you_ must_ tell me."

Ginny opened her mouth. The truth was on the tip of her tongue. But then a sudden, horrible thought went all through her, and she clamped her lips shut. The mediwitch was looking at her with narrowed eyes, a probing expression on her normally pleasant face, but Ginny didn't care. Her mind was racing, racing. 

If she told Madam Pomfrey that she knew it had been Colin, he'd be charged with the crime. Would it be handled by the student disciplinary board? Ginny thought that it would not be; it was too serious for that. It would go up before the Ministry of Magic, then. Colin would try to defend himself in any way he could, and he would undoubtedly take a leaf from Ron's book and blame Malfoy. After all, Colin had told the truth about one thing. Draco had actually given her that glass of punch when she was lying on the stone bench on the balcony of the tower, lying with her head in his lap, feeling the warmth of him under his wool robes, his hands moving over her so gently before they became less gentle, and then-- She forced her mind away from the treacherous thoughts. But there was no relief from them. 

In order for Colin to blame Malfoy, he'd obviously have to tell everyone what Ginny had really been doing, not the silly cock and bull story he'd fed Ron._ Have_ to? He'd _relish _it. Everyone would know that she'd been panting and pawing at Draco Malfoy like a bitch in heat. And worst of all, Colin had photographs to prove that every word he said was true. Ginny pictured the reactions of her family. Her housemates. Her friends. _Ron_. Oh God, Ron.

Ginny had thought she'd seen him truly angry earlier, after what Colin had told him. But she knew with a sudden sharp clarity that she'd seen nothing yet. Knowing that she'd done what she'd done with Draco of her own free will would tap into some bottomless pit of rage in her brother that she had never before seen, was afraid to even guess at. If Ron knew everything, it wouldn't matter what Harry or anybody else said or did. No power on earth could keep him from trying to kill Draco Malfoy with his bare hands. 

And this could not be allowed to happen. 

She didn't allow herself to think about the reasons why. 

Madam Pomfrey was looking at her with outright suspicion. Ginny realized that her silence had gone on too long. 

"I don't have the faintest idea who it could be," she said. "None at all." She couldn't tell. Ginny knew why Colin had winked at her, now. He had her in a box. She wanted to fall back against the bed, but forced herself to sit up straight. "May I go back to the Gryffindor dormitory now, to pack? I'm really feeling much better." 

Madam Pomfrey cleared her throat. "There is another issue."

"What?" asked Ginny stupidly. With a sudden, horrible, sinking feeling, she was very much afraid that she knew what. 

"Colin Creevey has declined to press charges, but there is the matter of an unprovoked attack on another student."

Ginny opened her mouth and then shut it again. 

"This sort of behavior is typical of the_ Disinhibio_ potion, of course. The aftereffects are very unpredictable." Madam Pomfrey bustled about near the window, plucking a long dressing-gown from a hook. She turned back towards the bed. "You need supervision. Care. Rest. So in a brief conference this morning, the teachers decided on a solution." The mediwitch's eyes were very kindly. Too kind, too pitying. Ginny had seen eyes like those before. Rings of them, surrounding her on all sides; the eyes of the teachers, the mediwizards, the aides, even the representative from the Ministry of Magic who had visited her and questioned her as she sat dully on a hospital cot in her bathrobe. Four years before. Madam Pomfrey was holding out a robe and a pair of slippers now. Ginny recoiled from them. 

"No," she said, shaking her head. Even before knowing, she knew. 

"It will be the best thing for you, my dear. Please, try to understand."

"I don't want to understand. I don't need to understand! I need to go home, oh please, please just let me go home!" Ginny was dimly aware that she was babbling; that she'd leaped out of bed and was swaying unsteadily on the floor. 

"A private room's been arranged for you," Madam Pomfrey said coaxingly, as if the prospect might tempt Ginny to go meekly. 

"_No_!" Hearing confirmation, Ginny went white, swaying where she stood, clinging to the bedpost. 

"A few weeks' rest at St. Mungo's will do you a world of good. Think of it as a sort of rest cure--"

"You're sending me to the nuthouse!" shrieked Ginny. "Do you think I don't remember what happened after they found me in the Chamber of Secrets?" 

The long, white corridors of St. Mungo's. The tests she'd had to take, the dowsing wands strapped to different parts of her body, the herb essences applied to her pulse points and their reactions carefully recorded. The questions she'd been forced to answer. She'd stared at the stone floor and mumbled at the mediwizards with the parchment and quills, and they'd looked at her, their faces creased with puzzlement and pity. The magical electrodes wired to her head, probing her brain, seeking out some hidden core of wrongness unknown even to herself. She'd cried through everything, cried for hours and days and weeks on end, knowing that she must be fundamentally flawed in some horrible way, or else Tom Riddle couldn't have found her, used her, twisted her.

Once the orderlies had caught her in the middle of the night taking her tenth shower of the day, her fingers and toes shriveled to prunes. Ginny had been scrubbing at her arms with a rough washcloth until the skin was red and raw. "I'll never get him off me," she'd sobbed, and they'd looked at each other over her head, and sighed. Once they'd found her scraping at her left thigh with a piece of jagged aluminium she'd found on the pavement during recreation hour. "Now what did ye do that for?" the nurse had scolded, passing her wand over the wound with a_ Coalescus_ charm. "There'll be a scar, mark my words." "It's where he touched me," she'd said in a whisper, and she'd seen the all-too-familiar look of pity spread across the nurse's face. "Hush, lambie, hush," she'd said, patting Ginny awkwardly. "It'll be all right." But even then, Ginny had known that it wouldn't. Couldn't be. 

They'd let her go at last, and she'd run to her mother in the hospital room and seized her with all her twelve-year-old might. They hadn't allowed her family to even visit her for the first two weeks; they never did allow that, with patients. "No exceptions," the head nurse had said through pinched lips. 

"It's all right, Ginny, shh, shh. It'll all, all be all right," Molly Weasley had soothed her daughter, as Ginny cried uncontrollably on the sidewalk and in the taxi and all the way up the cracked cobblestone walk to her house. 

And now they wanted to send her back. 

Madam Pomfrey was standing in the middle of the floor, "The St. Mungo's aides will be here shortly," she said. "Please understand, Ginny. It's our duty to do what's best for you. We're all agreed on this."

A soft knock came at the door. The mediwitch opened it a crack and whispered something to whoever was on the other side. There were low whispers in return. For a very long time, Madam Pomfrey simply stood there, unmoving. A sharp pungent smell, like burning green pine branches, drifted through the room. Although her movements were quick, there was something oddly slack about her face. "They've arrived," she said dreamily.

Ginny clung to the bedpost. "No," she repeated. 

"There's no reason to make such a fuss," Madam Pomfrey said in a strange monotone. She did not appear to be looking at Ginny, even though her face was turned towards the bed. 

_Something's wrong_, darted through Ginny's mind. _It's not just that I'm terrified of going, even though I am, God knows. But there's more. Something's horribly, horribly wrong. _But that was all that Ginny had time to think. Then the door opened fully, and she saw who was standing on the other side.


	6. The Book of Dreams

Chapter Six: The Book of Dreams. 

Friend, many and many a dream is mere confusion, a cobweb of no consequence at all. Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: One gateway of honest horn, and one of ivory. Issuing by the ivory gate are dreams of glimmering illusion, fantasies, but those that come through solid polished horn may be borne out, if mortals only know them.  
---Homer, _The Odyssey _

_A/N: _Thanks to all the reviewers. You will be individually named in the next chapter!! JKR owns what you recognize, I or history own what you don't. Lord Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, is Neil Gaiman's and is from the Sandman series. Crossover alert! But if you haven't read _Sandman_ (although everybody should!) it won't make any difference at all. The idea that Draco's an artist came from somebody on a board at fictionalley; if I could remember who, I'd thank her! Damn. I'm really proud of this chapter. 

8:30 p.m.: Malfoy Manor

Draco sat up with a gasp. The sound of a door creaking shut died away, somewhere ahead of him. For a moment, he had no idea where he was. He stared wildly around the thick, heavy tapestry hangings of the dark oak four-poster bed, at the Turkish carpets,the massive, ponderous furniture, the rows of bookshelves. There was a framed pastel sketch on the wall of the grounds about Malfoy Manor, the long gray grasses waving gently in the wind. A pen and ink of Apple, his old Shetland pony, asleep in a stall. A pencil portrait of his mother, her grave Madonna-face in profile. Wait... those drawings were his, he knew the hours and hours he'd spent on them... and this was _his_ room, at Malfoy Manor. Draco lay back down, staring up at the familiar pattern of the ceiling above him. How many, many nights he'd spent this way. And this looked to be another one of them. The Ginny-dream wouldn't stop wafting through his head, and Draco knew he'd get no more sleep this... night? day? The landscape outside the swagged velvet curtains at the bay window was dark, but it didn't feel late to him. 

He got up and padded over to the bedside table, pouring himself a glass of water from the crystal pitcher. He could tell now that it was mid-evening, perhaps a bit after eight; he could just see Venus rising over the full moon. He put the empty glass back down, and his eye was caught by a large book lying on the tabletop. 

Draco's fingers traced the embossed cover as he picked it up. The leather was delicately tooled into an elaborate colored pattern, inset with a mosaic of tiny jewels. It was obviously art, but unlike anything he'd seen before, shaped into a geometric pattern rather than being a recognizable picture of anything. It felt brittle and unimaginably old. The blank pages fell open to one spot, which had been marked by a quill pen, a tassel of gold and little rubies at its end. He'd _seen_ this before, or a picture of it anyway. But where? Draco closed his eyes for a moment, remembering. 

_"And now we must turn our attention to the curious question of enchanted diaries," Professor Binns was droning in History of Magical Artifacts class. It was an unseasonably warm day in the late autumn of his fifth year, the faint scent of apples from the enchanted orchard drifting in on a soft breeze. Perhaps ninety percent of the class was fast asleep. Draco was awake, although looking back on it now, he wasn't sure why. He'd already started to have trouble sleeping through the night by then. Perhaps it was simply that what Binns said next had captured all his attention. _

_"The dangers of common artifacts of this sort are well known," said the professor. "Several incidents have occurred in recent years. There is the case of the Bavarian diary, which caused Maria von Hesseldorf to become possessed by an evil spirit at Durmstrang. There is the Napoleonic diary, which captured Amalie de Marchais at Beauxbatons last spring. And even here at Hogwarts, there has been... " His words trailed off. The entire class snapped awake. _

_"Yet there is another sort of diary as well," Professor Binns said almost hurriedly. The roomful of students let out its breath in a collective sigh. Everyone knew what had not been said. Nobody ever mentioned the subject above a whisper. But the Hogwarts gossip network knew, or thought they knew, all about Tom Riddle's enchanted diary, and Ginny Weasley. Draco, however, was the only one who really did know. _

_Even he hadn't found out the truth easily. Lucius Malfoy had never told him, and his father's face would grow livid with rage every time the subject was brought up by anyone. Draco had picked up what he knew by listening to snippets of gossip from house-elves talking when they didn't know he was around, and piecing together hints and clues. It had been an embarrassingly failed attempt to gain power, and, as such, none of the Death Eaters was very eager to discuss it. And, of course, it was another attempt that Potter had thwarted, another chance for him to play the hero-- and to rescue Ginny Weasley. _

_Sometimes, in those nights of increasingly broken sleep in the Slytherin dormitory that autumn, Draco had dreamed that _ he'd_ found his way into the Chamber of Secrets, and he'd been the one to rescue her. Except that it wasn't when she was twelve and he barely thirteen, but now. She wasn't a child, but a beautiful girl, and there was something other than scorn and dislike in her golden eyes when she looked at him. Draco always found it extremely difficult to get back to sleep after one of these dreams. _

_"These are known as Morpheus Librum, or the Books of Dreams," Professor Binns was saying in his flat, grey voice. "The most obvious difference between these and the other sorts of diaries is that in these cases, the originating writer must be a living person, not a spirit or a memory. This person speaks to the reader in a dream state, communicating directly and without conscious thought. For this reason, a Book of Dreams actually poses a greater danger to the writer than it does to the reader, as the writer may reveal things he or she would not do if completely conscious and aware. Nor will the writer remember what has been written, upon awakening. The most famous of these books is the so-called **Kitap -in Düs** of Istanbul. Turn to page three hundred and ninety-four in your textbooks to view an illustration." Draco had flipped the pages, and there it was. A picture of the book he now held in his hands. _

"_Accendius_," said Draco, and the candles around his bedroom lit themselves. He walked to the bay windowseat and sat down in it, curling his feet under him as he had used to do when he was a small child. His old wizard's chess set of green marble was still laid out on the deep windowsill. He played with the pieces a little, thinking. 

"It's all very well for _you_," grumbled the black queen. "Come and go as you please, that's about the size of it."

"I've been at school," he told her absently. 

"We were your companions, your brothers-in-arms," the white knight said sadly. "Have you forgotten us already?"

"Time moves on," Draco said, weighing the book in his hands. "Things change."

"Yet we gave you comfort when all comfort seemed lost," said the knight, resettling himself on his dispirited dirty-gray horse. "You whispered to us your childhood secrets, and we alone felt the falling of your tears. Remember?" 

Yes, Draco remembered. But he shook his head. He would never give in to memories like these again. They'd only weaken him, and he was, he sensed, moving past all human weakness now. He pushed the board aside. 

"He's a spoiled brat, like all the Malfoys," sniffed the queen. "Always was, always will be."

"What do you expect? We're only pawns," sighed a pawn. And then the chess board was silent and motionless once again. 

The pages of the book were blank, and they smelled of old parchment and long-abandoned dungeons. He dripped a little ink from the end of the quill, and the black spot vanished instantly. He waited. Slowly, he began to realize that he was waiting for something to happen; no, for instructions of some kind. Far, far away, he felt another mind touching his own, a consciousness far older, far more subtle. _Lord Grindelwald_. 

"So what do I do now?" he whispered. 

The mind of Lord Grindelwald seemed to be feeling out his own, attempting to penetrate it, to move through it. Draco tried to tell himself that he was willing. He couldn't balk at whatever was asked of him in the Dark Lord's service. Yet his own mind would not stop rebelling. It threw up a barrier so strong that the Grindelwald-consciousness retreated in shock. _Very well,_ it seemed to say at last. _For now, my young apprentice. _

Left to his own devices, Draco sighed, staring at the pages. At last, he picked up the quill and did what Ginny Weasley had done with her own, very different diary._ I am Draco Malfoy_, he wrote. _Who are you_?

Black, angular words formed on the page. _I greet you, Draco Malfoy. I am he who is called Al-laddin al-Rashid._

The flickering candlelight cast shadows on the words. _Now _what? Draco thought for a moment, and then wrote, _Where are you?_

_I dwell in the city of Istanbul, under the reign of the Sultan Süleyman, Defender of the Faith, the Great Khan, He Who Wields the Sword of Ayub, may he live a thousand thousand years. _

_But if this Al-laddin al-Rashid lives in Istanbul_, thought Draco, _shouldn't he be writing in Turkish or something? Why can I read what he's writing? And how can he understand what **I'm **writing?_

The writing, still black and strong, took on a vague quality. _What would you with me, Son of the Morning?_

_What is he on about? _ wondered Draco. _I just **told ** him who I was... it's almost like he was enchanted, or talking in his sleep... _Of course. That was the answer. Al-laddin al-Rashid was asleep, and walking through the world of dreams. That also explained why they could understand each other; they were communicating directly rather than using language. Now all Draco had to do was to figure out what the point of this entire exercise was. The book had obviously been left on the bedside table for a reason. The point of these particular types of diaries, the Books of Dreams, seemed to be that the writer had no real idea who they were talking to or even what they were saying, and could be made to reveal anything. It was only logical, then, that there was some secret to reveal. He wondered how the connection was made between reader and writer, but for the moment it didn't matter. Draco picked up the quill and began writing again, choosing his words carefully. 

_I sense that there is something you wish to tell me. _

_Yes, my Lord. _

Draco paused to savor those words. _ My Lord_. Oh, he could get used to hearing that. 

_What do you wish to say?_

_I would tell to you a story. _

_Then tell it, Al-laddin al-Rashid, _Draco wrote_. _

The words began appearing more quickly than before, as if the writer had been waiting long and long for the secrets of his tale to be told. 

_In the name of Allah, the all-compassionate, the all-merciful, and the all-wise, the time has come at last for the secrets of Al-Juhara Har-am to be revealed. It is I, Al-laddin al-Rashid, who tells this tale, member of the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Tower and the Pheonix. Our order was founded by a descendant of Mohammed and a descendant of Abraham in the year that is, by the Western reckoning, 1154. And it is also in that year that my tale of the Jewel of the Harem took place. All praises be upon Allah, and Mohammed, His Prophet._

At the bottom of the page an emblem appeared, like a seal used to mark letters with red wax. It was in the shape of a great bird with arrows clenched in one claw and a spray of laurel leaves in the other. Draco couldn't shake the feeling that it should mean something to him, that he'd seen it _somewhere,_ but he couldn't call up the memory. And that year... _1154-- wait_-- Draco's brow wrinkled. That was the year that Hogwarts had been founded by Rowena Ravenclaw, Godric Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, and Salazar Slytherin. Could there be a connection? 

_In the vast round city of Mansur, the Caliph of Baghdad did dwell, he who was known as al-Hambra the Great. And on one night he did dream a dream of portent. He looked over the high tower of his palace and said, "Behold, and compare. Is there any city on earth like unto my city? Is there any power, any beauty, any majesty that can compare with what I have created?"_

_And the Lord of Dreams, one of the seven Endless Immortals, he whom the Greeks called Morpheus, did appear to him on the balcony of the high tower, and did say to him, 'No, al-Hambra the Great. There is not."_

_"In all this city there are riches beyond the dreams of avarice. There is a street whose cobblestones are pure gold, and those who walk upon it shake gold dust from their shoes."_

_"It is so," said the Lord of Dreams. _

_"There is a garden where the green jade vines grow from the earth, and their grapes are emeralds," said the Caliph. "The almond trees are wrought of silver, and the rain falls as a shower of diamonds. The apricots, I believe, are topaz."_

_"This, also, is so."_

_"In my harem are women of such beauty that a mere glimpse of them has driven mortals mad, and tempted gods to descend to earth for a night of bliss. I, of course, am immune. Unless I choose not to be."_

_Dream did bow his dark head, and his eyes were like unto pools of black water that have no shore. "All that you have said, o mighty Caliph, is truth."_

_"Wilt thou, o Lord of Dreams, then tell to me one more truth?"_

_"That I will."_

_"In this city of perfection, can there be any who suffers?"_

_"There cannot."_

_"However," said the Caliph, "I speak not only of what is, but of what shall be. "_

_The Lord of Dreams turned aside. "Would you see the far future, that which no mortal man was meant to see?"_

_"I would."_

_In answer, the Immortal spread out his arm, and the spell of darkness cast by him did cover all the enchanted night of Baghdad. The silence was broken by destruction greater than in all the wars yet waged by the children of men. In the wake of this darkness Caliph al-Hambra did see things that no man now living may understand. What these things may be, I do not know, and may Allah preserve us from the knowledge of them. And the eyes of the Caliph were as those of a man who has drunk from the waters of living death. _

_"I would give all that is, and all that may be, to take back my request," he said. _

_"What the Immortals give, they do not take back," said the Lord of Dreams. _

_"Yet this future may be changed."_

_"That power lies always in the hands of man."_

_"The evil I have seen is undoubtedly caused by demons," said the Caliph. _

_"Not by demons, but by men," replied the Lord of Dreams, but the Caliph did not hear him. _

_"The War Chief south of the Rhine, Wulfric Aethelhard, from the barbaric lands far to the west, has this day sent me a tribute." And the Caliph held up his hands, and in them was a great ruby that contained fire and ice within its depths. "I will order my sorcerors to capture the King of the Demons in their webs of spells, and imprison him within this ruby. Throughout the ages, he whom the Egpytians have called Set, whom the Greeks have called Prometheus, whom the men of the far north have called Loki, whom those of the far east have called Susano-o-san, and whom the Jews have called Satan, will be captured within its depths, unable to do harm."_

_"Do not do this thing."_

_"I may save mankind," said the Caliph. _

_"By trapping Lucifer, the Light Bearer, he who fell from heaven, he who was once the King of the Angels and the Son of the Morning? O, do not do so, Caliph al-Hambra." And then a marvel happened that all the worlds of men have never seen before, nor since. One of the Immortals bowed his head, and knelt to man. "I beg you to hold your hand from this terrible thing," said the Lord of Dreams. _

_But the Caliph commanded that his sorcerors should gather all their powers together. And they stood about the ruby and chanted the forbidden words of the Dark Arts to bring the King of the Demons. A great spirit of light, as of a man falling eternally through fire, howled his anguish throughout the worlds as they imprisoned him within the faceted depths. And they believed that they had conquered evil for all eternity. But even as they rejoiced, a terrible sound of laughter filled the throne room of the Caliph. And a spirit of darkness spread its hand over all the great city of Baghdad. In that darkness, it became as any other city, good and evil alike weighed in its scales. And the spirit flew out into the world, seeking a man to inhabit. Since that day, it has always done so. In trying to destroy evil, the Caliph set loose a greater evil._

_And the Lord of Dreams did leave the city of Baghdad with sadness on his face, if sadness there be without human longing or human regret. And the tears that fell from his eyes to the sand became jewels beyond price. _

_May Allah witness that this tale I have told is truth, for Allah is the best of all witnesses._

Draco took a deep breath. He couldn't really say that he'd fully understood anything he'd just read. But the story seemed to give off a kind of dark light, as if it contained a mystery that drew him in, daring him to learn enough to solve it. On the next page, a full illustration appeared. He studied it closely. A group of men in long, richly colored robes were standing over an immense glowing ruby; they were the sorcerors of Baghdad, he supposed. And seated on a golden throne was a man with a vast jeweled turban. The Caliph. But rising out of the jewel even as the King of the Demons descended into it was-- was--

"Voldemort," he said in a whisper. 

Draco had, of course, never truly seen the Dark Lord. But Lucius Malfoy had whispered descriptions to his son a thousand thousand times in the depths of the night, when they were both roaming the halls of Malfoy Manor, sleep denied them; both slumped at the long polished oaken table in the great dining hall, waiting for daylight to release them. The skeletal body; the thin spidery arms and legs; the face, whiter than a skull, with huge scarlet eyes, a flat, slitted nose, and snakelike lips. He was floating up from the jewel. 

He blinked. No. It was_ Grindelwald_, exactly as Draco had seen him only hours before. The craggy face, the piercing blue eyes, the colorless hair under its black velvet cap. 

And then there were the faces and bodies of others, ones Draco recognized only dimly from their portraits in the books in his father's library, the ones on the history of dark magicians. Their forms flitted through the spirit rising from the jewel. At last, they had all gone out into the world. 

And at last, Draco understood. 

But the black, thick writing was still appearing on the page, and he continued reading.

_And so our order was formed in that year in an alliance between the children of Hagar and the children of Abraham, and we did vow to guard the Jewel so that its power could do no further evil in this world. It was hidden in the high tower of the Great Mosque, which Christians then called the Hagia Sophia, for many hundreds and hundreds of years. When Mohammed the Conqueror, blessed be his memory, did take the great city of Constantinople to rename it as Istanbul, the Jewel was lost for many years, and all our thought and will went to the hunting of it._

_Why so?_ Draco wrote.

_This world of man is both good, and evil. But if the man housing the spirit of evil in any day and age did grasp the jewel in his hands, then would the power of evil become absolute. And this man's reign would last until time and times were done. In that day, the Jewel was found, and secreted in the Grand Seraglio of Istanbul. So it is that now it is called the Jewel of the Harem. _

Another thought came to Draco. _ What year is it_? he wrote. 

_It is nearly the spring of that year which is, by Western reckoning, 1566. _

Draco dropped the quill to the page. "That can't be," he whispered hoarsely. "Professor Binns said that the writer of the diary had to be a living man. It's almost_ 1997._ That was over four hundred years ago!"He stared over the pages almost unseeingly.

_Now_-- the writing seemed to hesitate. _Now our fear is far greater than it was in the days of Mohammed. For the coming of a great evil to the city of Istanbul and to the Ottoman Empire has been foretold. And our order is waning, waning; we have not the strength to fight it. We have not the strength to guard the Jewel. Either our hope cometh soon, or else all hope's end. _

Draco slammed the book shut. 

He was not really surprised to see Lord Grindelwald sitting next to him on the window seat. Or perhaps seeing wasn't the right word for it, but Draco sensed him with every nerve and fiber he possessed. His body shrank away from the undead thing, but his will was stronger. "I greet you, my Lord."

"And who am I?" asked Grindelwald. 

"You are He Who Cannot Be Named. You are He Who Has Many Names."

"Ah," said Grindelwald, nodding. "So you do understand, my little _Drachen_." He put his long, long fingers on either side of the silvery blond head. For a panicked instant, Draco had to fight every natural impulse he had. Every single one of them seemed to be screaming_ No, no! Get away from that thing as fast as you can! For God's sake, run... before it's too late... _But it was already too late. He forced himself to stay still by a tremendous effort of the will, and after a few moments it became much easier. The voices were silenced. 

"And now, my young apprentice... tell me vat I must know."

In times to come, Draco could never piece together what had happened to him then. It occupied an eternity, and no time at all. Mostly he just remembered the sound of Lord Grindelwald's voice with its low, almost harsh, drawling Bavarian accent, eerily like his mother's voice. It crooned in his ear and asked him questions, and he told all he knew. Draco told the Dark Lord everything he'd heard at the top of the North Tower between Cornelius Fudge, Moody, and Dumbledore, everything he'd seen on that piece of parchment stamped _From the Desk of Hermione Granger, _every snippet of conversation and expression on everyone's face. Draco said nothing about what he had done with Ginny Weasley. But he was sure that the Dark Lord knew anyway. Long after his conscious mind had run dry, Grindelwald seemed to be tapping directly into his memories, and not only those. Drop by drop, Draco felt thought, sense, and emotion being leached from him. He thought almost dreamily that he could actually feel the last traces of humanity leaving him, draining away. Almost gone. 

But then they caught on a snag. 

Draco's mind and soul had no real defenses left; he had been too suffused in darkness by a lifetime with Lucius Malfoy for that. But his body remembered, and cried out. 

The honey-tang taste of Ginny Weasley's lips. 

The feel of her hair, maddeningly soft; the sensation of touching her skin, smoother than silk. 

The ripe curves of her body moving against him, under his hands; the little low sounds she made deep in her throat when he kissed her; the whiteness of her shoulders, rising out of a sea of red and gold. 

And, above all...

That inexplicable feeling of absolute _rightness_ when she had been in his arms, of safety, of wholeness. As if he had been drowning in a sea of nightmares, and the touch of her hand had awakened him on dry land at last. 

"This girl I see..." said Grindelwald, "this Ginny Veasley, vat is she to you?"

"Nothing," said Draco. "She's nothing to me." 

The mind of Grindelwald probed his. "I t'ink you are not telling me the truth."

"I am sorry, my Lord," whispered Draco. 

The Dark Lord was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, there was something almost like amusement in his voice. "This is not a matter for sorrow." 

And then his spiderlike fingers clutched at Draco's head again, and there was no more room for thought. 

A blank shaft of time passed. It could have been seconds or hours or days. 

Then there were gentle hands on his forehead, brushing back the damp hair, soothing his aching temples. He knew those cool slim hands with their long fingers. They weren't everyday hands. Those few times he'd felt them wer the only times he used the word that now came to him, their own rare, special word. 

"_Mutti_," he whispered. "Your hands are so cool, _Mutti_." His beautiful, cold, unattainable mother. She was so like the illustration in his old wizard's fairy tale book of Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen in her winter sleigh that when he was a very small child he hadn't quite been able to tell the two apart. Only when Draco was ill and in bed with a high fever did he ever feel her hands on him, her glacial blue eyes turned towards him. She would always call him by his middle name then. _Lukas, Lukas_, she would whisper, and that he was her _liebling_, her _patscherl_, her_ handerl_, in that smooth drawling voice of hers-- surely he'd heard those endearments from her at least once? Then she was eternally moving away from him, only the tips of her long elegant fingers brushing through the hair that fell over his forehead before she retreated into the mists. But his mother was in Bavaria; she'd escaped this. Was out of all this. Was safe. He felt a dim gladness. He told himself that it was because she didn't understand, couldn't really be a part of it. It was better so. Draco opened his eyes.

Narcissa Malfoy was bending over him. 

"Mother?" he asked in shock. 

"Shhh," she said. "You need to rest a bit more, you should not try to speak."

Draco sat up, rubbing his eyes, and saw the glowing hands of the Muggle watch she wore in the dimness of the room. "It's only nine o'clock?" he asked stupidly. The events of the past half hour felt as if they had spanned eons. "What are you _doing _here?"

She shrugged slightly, her shoulders moving under the elegant silk robes. "Where else should I be?"

"Well-- _Linz_--" The words died on Draco's lips as he sat up and saw who else was in the room. He wondered if for an instant he had almost thought all the events of this day some sort of fever dream, vanishing at his mother's touch. Well, they weren't. He got out of bed, standing up, refusing to give in to the last traces of dizzying weakness. There was no time for them now. 

Lord Grindelwald was standing by the window, looking more substantial than he had earlier. The mistiness had faded from his outlines. To a casual observer, he must have appeared human, although Draco certainly knew better. _He looks more human because of what he took from me_, thought Draco with a shudder, which he repressed. He was proud to serve the Dark Lord in this way; he who would command, must first serve. And next to Grindelwald was Lucius Malfoy. He looked at his wife, who said primly, "My place is with my husband and my son." She folded her long white hands beneath the sleeves of her robe. Her face was as immobile as carved marble. 

Lucius gave one cold nod, as if confirming a point already made and set in stone. "We are nearly ready to go down," he said. 

"Ve need one other. The last," said Lord Grindelwald.

"Who?" asked Draco.

"Ginny Veasley."

"She's-- is she here?" He tried, and failed, to keep the eagerness out of his voice. 

Lucius looked at his son sharply. "The girl is at Hogwarts. She will be retrieved and brought back. The nearest apparation point is at the train station, and we have a carriage waiting, so it shouldn't take long."

"Oh, I'm sure she'll cooperate with you, Father," Draco said acidly. "What are you going to do, ask her if she'd like to spend the Christmas hols at Malfoy Manor?"

"It's all arranged," said Lucius, even more curtly than before. "I've just received information from our Hogwarts spy that the Weasley girl is in the hospital wing. Our operatives will use the _Kargasa_ charm to take her out."

Draco had no idea what this might be. But he looked back silently at his father, refusing to give him the pleasure of asking. 

"You don't know all there is to know about magic yet, Draco," Lucius continued with a trace of satisfaction in his voice. "It's a Turkish charm. Works through the burning of incense. Very like Confundus, but much more efficient and thorough. They'll Apparate to Hogwarts, then use the tunnel into the school through the basement of Honeydukes."

"There's a tunnel into Hogwarts?" Draco asked in surprise

"More than one. Barty Crouch passed on quite a bit of useful information before the end. I told you, boy..." Lucius continued softly, "you don't know all there is to know, not yet..." 

Two massive figures stepped forward out of the shadows of the room. Draco recognized Crabbe and Goyle-- were they _ ever _going to stop growing taller and bulkier? Goyle, in particular, resembled a surly gorilla more than ever. He nodded to them, and they grunted at him. It was the first time they had all even acknowledged each other's presence in well over a year. The insults the three had hurled at Potter and his friends on the train from Hogwarts at the end of fourth year had actually been their last moment as a united front. Draco often wondered if Potter or Weasley or that mudblood Granger ever knew that his desperate taunts that day had been an attempt to convince _himself_, not them. The Death Eaters had still been concealing the truth then. But over the summer, it had become increasingly, hideously clear. Nothing would restore Lord Voldemort. This being the case, much of the Malfoy power was vanished. Some of Draco's former Slytherin friends had deserted him with the haste of rats leaving a sinking ship once the news got out. Some, like Milicent, Xanthia, and Sadina, had lingered longer. But Crabbe and Goyle's bodyguard duties had ended rather soon. Now, as Pansy had, they were slinking back. His lip curled. 

"Ve must have Ginny Veasley," Lord Grindelwald was saying. 

Ginny. Ginny in the hospital wing at Hogwarts (_was she all right? surely, surely she was_,) and Draco could feel the blood pounding in his head. He could see her in his mind's eye, lying peacefully in an infirmary bed in a white nightgown, her hands upon the white sheets, white curtains blowing at the windows, and the purity of the scene only inflamed him the more. He was going to get Ginny Weasley. 

"Right then," he said. "Let's go." 

"No," said Lucius Malfoy, putting out an arm to bar his son's progress to the door. "We need you here now. Pansy will be the third."

Another figure, much slimmer and smaller, stirred slightly. It threw the hood of its black cloak back, revealing Pansy Parkinson's shiny dark head. "Aren't you glad to see me?" she asked Draco. 

"No," he said. 

She laughed. "Aren't you going to thank me?"

"Whatever for?"

She indicated the bedside table. "I brought you that book, Draco."

The book. What he'd written in it, what he'd read in it, what he'd learned from it... "Stop that damn laughing," he said to her. 

"The _Kitap-an-Düs_," she said.

"I know that it's the _Kitap-an-Düs_. Professor Binns talked about it in one of his bloody boring lectures last year, remember?"

Pansy only laughed again. Draco had to remind himself that she must be necessary to this mission, which made it inadvisable to strangle her. 

Lucius Malfoy pressed a small, oval metal thing with pierced sides into Pansy's palm. "Remember to light this once you've reached the hospital wing. There needs to be plenty of smoke by the time Madam Pomfrey sees you, or you'll never convince her that you're St. Mungo's aides."

"I don't think she's very bright," said Pansy, with a particularly irritating giggle.

"Nevertheless, make sure it is done correctly." Lucius stepped closer to her. "We're all relying on you, my dear Pansy. Do you really believe I'd trust _them_--" Lucius pointed discreetly towards Crabbe and Goyle "-- with a task this delicate?" His voice lowered considerably on the last words. 

Pansy looked up at him through stubby black lashes. "I'd never fail you, Lucius," she softly said. 

Draco's eyebrows raised. So Pansy Parkinson and his father were on a first-name basis now? He glanced at his mother, but Narcissa Malfoy was looking out the window and appeared not to have heard the exchange. 

"I'm sure you won't," Lucius continued, then raised his voice again. "Stupefy the Weasley girl once you've got her away from the hospital wing and she's recorded in the log as having gone to St. Mungo's. Then get back here as soon as possible. Rendezvous with the other operatives in the dungeons once you've succeeded in your task, if you can. If it's past ten, however, don't bother. Time is of the essence here. "

"Do you actually mean to tell me," demanded Draco, "that Crabbe and Goyle passed an Advanced Apparation test? That they can bring Ginny Weasley back with them while she's unconscious?"

"Of course not," Lucius Malfoy said impatiently. "Pansy will do it. They've all received private tutoring, however; I'm certainly not going to have Apparation abilities on record for any of them."

_Wonderful. What_ else_ went on that I wasn't told about? Before I was told anything? _ thought Draco. 

"I've practiced it many times," said Pansy, her dark eyes glittering. "I'll get her back, don't worry."

"Yeah," said Crabbe to Goyle. That monosyllable proved amusing to them for some obscure reason, and they started snickering. 

Pansy, Crabbe, and Goyle getting their hands on Ginny Weasley. In a near-empty Hogwarts, with almost everyone gone for the holidays. The thought disturbed Draco very deeply. "Are you sure this is wise?" he asked Grindelwald, who had been standing silently. 

"Who are you talking to?" asked Pansy. He ignored her

"Vat is it you fear, my young apprentice?" said Grindelwald. 

"Well--" fumbled Draco "-- Pansy Parkinson's always hated Gin-- the Weasley girl, and _they_--" He jerked his head at Crabbe and Goyle, who were poking each other in the ribs and making obscene hand gestures. "I wouldn't trust them around her as far as I could throw them." 

"So you're... concerned about her?" his father asked silkily. 

"My Lord," Draco said, speaking pointedly to Grindelwald, "if she's important to the mission--"

He was interrupted by a fresh burst of sniggering from Crabbe and Goyle. They were moving their blocky forefingers in circles around their ears. 

"Ready for the nuthatch, in't he?" said Crabbe. At this witticism, Goyle started slapping his knees, too convulsed with laughter to speak.

"What's this all about?" Draco asked. Turning towards them, he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. Following it with his head, he saw Crabbe and Goyle's giggling reflections in the window on the other side of the room. And Draco himself, and Lucius Malfoy, Narcissa... no-one else. He swung his head around the other way and saw Grindelwald standing next to the bedside table.

"You don't see him? Lord Grindelwald?" he said incredulously to Crabbe and Goyle. They collapsed in fresh bursts of laughter. "Mother?" Draco asked tentatively. She glanced at him almost fearfully, shaking her head. "...Father?" 

"I sense the Dark Lord's presence," said Lucius Malfoy. "And I hear his voice, which is more than anyone else can do."

"But you don't _see_ him?"

"No," his father said reluctantly. "Only you can see him." He set his lips in a thin line, and Draco guessed what it must have cost Lucius Malfoy to admit that his son had a power he himself lacked. 

"Do you understand, my young apprentice?" Grindelwald asked softly. 

Slowly, Draco nodded. 

"This is a privilege you alone possess," the Dark Lord crooned in his harsh yet strangely compelling voice, and Draco felt a warm glow of pride. He felt his old smile stretch across his lips, the smile that went no deeper than his teeth, sardonic, amused. He watched his window-self do the same. There was power in him again, a power he had not felt in nearly two years. Except that when he was fifteen, it had been his father's power. Now, it was his. 

Crabbe and Goyle had stopped laughing and were staring at him dumbly, Draco realized. Goyle, in particular, resembled a half-witted bull, with dull eyes and thick lips hanging open in shock. 

"What are you lot waiting for?" he asked with a sneer. "Go to Hogwarts and get Weasley. Bring her back, but if any of you lays a finger on her, I'll know and you'll be bloody sorry."

Lucius stepped forward. "I'll decide that. And I'll decide when."

"Will you," said Draco coolly. 

"As the head of this mission, I believe I will."

The Malfoys, father and son, flicked their silver-grey eyes to Lord Grindelwald for support. 

"Patience, patience, my apprentice, and my friend," the Dark Lord said smoothly. He put a hand on each of their shoulders. It gave Draco some mean satisfaction to know that he felt those bony fingers solidly and his father did not. "Ve must vork together, _hein_?" Grindelwald continued. "Or our enemies' laughter vill be our only revard."

"But of_ course_, Father," said Draco, settling his face into bland lines. "I only want this mission to be a success. I know how important it is. The book told me so-- the _Kitap-an Düs_." He emphasized the word "me" very, very slightly. 

"So much ambition, Draco. Ambition is a good thing, of course," said Lucius Malfoy, his gaze intent on his son's expressionless face. " But the half-fledged dragon should not try to fly too far, or too fast... or his wings may be clipped. And then he will fall." He turned to Crabbe, Goyle, and Pansy. "Go," he said. "And don't hurt the Weasley girl. That wouldn't suit our purposes at all." The three Disapparated with a pop. 

The four left in the room prepared to wait. Grindelwald and Lucius Malfoy began discussing something in low tones, and Draco walked over to the bay window and sat in the soft cushions of the window seat. His mother stood next to him, leaning against the windowframe slightly, as motionless and silent as a waxwork. The moon had risen all the way now and was full. Draco watched its progress across the clouded sky, his mind flooded with Ginny Weasley. 

They'd bring her back safely _(damn well _better_ be safely_. _Of all the people to send after her, those Neanderthals Crabbe and Goyle... And especially Pansy Parkinson. She'd just as soon rip Ginny Weasley's face off as look at her. If Pansy touches her I'll--_) and she'd be enchanted to stillness, like a fairy princess asleep. Perhaps he'd tell them to lay her on his bed so she wouldn't hurt herself by falling when she came to, her long red-gold locks of hair streaming about her, her snow-white face set and still. He'd murmur "_Enervate_" and awaken her with a touch of his wand, and her golden eyes would open and look at him; what emotion would be in them? 

_Fear._

No matter how many times he ran the scene in his head, all Draco could ever see from her was fear. "You're mine, you're for me, not them. There's nothing to be afraid of," he would say to her, and her body would stiffen and her eyes would fill with-- Still fear, still stuck on fear. How did he know there was nothing for her to afraid of, anyway? What was that knowledge, what could it ever be, to him? And as Draco stared out the window and bit his lip, he knew that all of these were thoughts he should not be thinking. 

"They draw near," said the voice of Lord Grindelwald. "I can feel it. It is time for us to go down." 

Lucius Malfoy nodded, and picked up the _Kitan-ap Düs_ from the table. "The Portkey is ready, my Lord. At the stroke of twelve, the tower awaits."

One by one, they left the room and filed towards the door that led to the dungeons. 

A/N:Review! Review! Here are some notes relating to the last 3 chapters:

When Lucius talks about the information Barty Crouch passed on, this relates to the canon fact that, in GoF, the fake Professor Moody had possession of the Marauder's Map for quite some time. I'm assuming that the information that was on it, including the location of the tunnels, got back to the other Death Eaters. 

The children of Hagar are Muslims, and the children of Abraham are Jews. This refers to the legend that the religion of Islam was founded by the son of Hagar and Abraham. 

Of all the gods that the Caliph of Baghdad mentions as trapping in the Jewel of the Harem, you may not recognize Susan-o-o. He was the Japanese sun goddess Aminaterasu's brother. Supposedly, the Japanese royal family is descended from them. 

When Ginny was rescued from the CoS, she was twelve and Draco thirteen because, in my little world, his birthday is December 26, and hers is February 3rd. I'll bet Draco always got those awful combination Christmas and birthday presents from all his relatives. That's enough to turn anybody towards ultimate evil. ;) 

Basically,in the previous chapter, Ginny's been committed (and very improperly, too.) JKR never goes into details about the process in canon, of course, so I extrapolated and came up with my own rules. The situation with involuntary commission of minors in the magical world is very similar to pre-1960's America, and the details are taken from that. The state of mental health care is almost medieval. It's very easy to put someone in a mental hospital and keep them there indefinitely. The administrative details are sloppy, which is why it was possible for Lucius Malfoy to send fake medical aides to whisk Ginny away simply by intercepting the owls to St. Mungo's. Family members aren't permitted to visit for the first few weeks. And yes, before the deinstitutionalization movements of the 1960's and 1970's, that's what it frequently was really like, and worse. 


	7. Run Ginny Run

Chapter Seven.

Run Ginny Run. 

We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown.

--John Wesley Powell 

If you recognize it as JKR's, it's hers; if you don't, it belongs to either me or history. 

A/N: Remember... This is a fic with lots of furry plot bunnies hopping through it, and mysteries abound. If something isn't clear now, don't worry, it WILL be. More than any other chapter, this one contains foreshadowing hints for later. That's one reason why I try to update so often. I might do a running character list pretty soon. 

There are several fics that explore Celtic mythology-- Irina's Morrigan Trilogy and Firesprite's Incendio are the best I know of. But I haven't found any that are based on Teutonic magic. Kinda doubt there are any. Well, this one is (Yeah, yeah, there's some Celtic stuff too. Ungodly amounts of research were done.) When Loki asks Ginny to free him, he's trapped in a hexensymbol. 'Twill be explained later. If you've ever seen the enigmatic decorations on barns (especially in old Pennsylvania Deustch country,) you've seen one.   
Well, guess what? This thing is going to be a long journey, every bit as long as, say, GoF. There's a lot of dark delicious fic to come... so fasten your seat belts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride. I will probably be starting a Yahoo group pretty soon for the fics of a.) me and b.) VioletJersey, maybe more authors to come. Let me know in your review if you think it's a good idea!  


Pansy Parkinson stepped through the door of the hospital room, pulling back the hood of her cloak to reveal her shiny black hair, so much darker than her sister's.

"Thank you for coming on such short notice," Madam Pomfrey said dreamily. "St. Mungo's will be the most appropriate placement for her... Miss Weasley will be able to get the care she needs..."

"Pansy?" Ginny asked in disbelief. 

"Why, no. My name is Nurse Turpin. But confusion is a common side effect of _Disinhibio_," said the other girl. Then she smirked at Ginny. 

"I_t is _you! What are you doing here?" Ginny began backing away, then saw the pair behind Pansy. "Crabbe and Goyle," she said dumbly. 

They poked each other in the side and snickered, nodding. "She's worse than we were led to believe," said Pansy in a regretful tone of voice. Apparently, she had been placed in charge of all verbal communication. Goyle stepped forward and reached for Ginny's arm with a meaty hand. 

"No!" Ginny put her arms behind her back as fast as he could. But both boys only chuckled. 

"Fight all you want," said Goyle. "_She_ won't notice." He jerked a thumb at Madam Pomfrey, who was looking out the window now, a vague expression on her face. 

"Why don't we go to the office and sign the discharge book," Pansy said soothingly to the mediwitch, steering her out of the room. Their footsteps retreated down the hall. Goyle turned to look at Ginny in a way that made her skin crawl. 

"Personally, I sort of like it better that way. When they fight," he leered. He grasped Ginny upper arm, and she struggled against the iron grip of his massive fingers. She opened her mouth to scream. He clapped his other hand over her face, and a black curtain descended. 

"L-leggo of her, she can't breathe," Ginny heard Crabbe saying from a great distance."And we're not s-s-supposed to touch her, you m-m-moron."

"Don't call me a moron. You and your fuckin' stuttering." That other hand was closing over one of her breasts, and Ginny bucked her body violently with all the fading strength that was left in her. 

"I do n-not stutter."

"Yes you d-d-do," said Goyle in a mocking tone of voice. "Shut up. Lemme do the thinking.Why can't I have a little fun? Who would know anyway?"

"Malfoy'll know. He k-knows everything," said Crabbe. 

There was a pause. The hand over her mouth and nose shifted a little, and Ginny took great gasps of air. "Pissing your pants over what Malfoy would think-- he can just go and fuck himself for all I care." Goyle's voice was filled with uneasy bravado. 

"Why don't you s-s-say that to his face, Goyle. Or maybe I'll tell him."

"You threatening me, Crabbe?" The other boy's voice turned belligerent, and he relaxed his grip on Ginny. 

The two started pushing each other, moving across the room, towards the window, growling low in their throats. For the moment, she was forgotten. 

"Y-you're really going to bugger this thing up, aren't you, G-goyle? All b-b-because you think you have to get your oats off with Weasley--"

"I always thought you were queer, Crabbe," the other boy growled, grappling with his opponent. They shoved each other all the way to the window, knocking over the chess set where Ron and Hermione had been playing earlier. The door stood ajar. The pair was actually so dumb that they hadn't kept themselves between her and the exit! Ginny darted towards it. But Pansy, coming back from the hall, was quicker. She swung the pierced metal disc on its chain right under Ginny's nose, pressing a handkerchief to her own face with her other hand.

"Put your mind at rest, lay your thoughts to sleep. _Uyumak, uyamak, yatacak yer saglamak_," she droned. Tendrils of the thick, oily smoke crept up to Ginny's face. A black blankness spread through her mind. 

"Time for a nice, long rest at St. Mungo's,"a crooning female voice was saying, and Ginny nodded in stupefied agreement. Of course. That made sense. They were medical aides; what had she been thinking when she said that she wouldn't go with them? The young woman with the dark smooth hair, who of course wasn't Pansy Parkinson, was reaching for her arm, leading her out of the room; the two male aides, who of course Ginny had never seen before, were flanking her. But as Ginny moved across the floor, her bare foot stepped on the upright black queen. 

"Ow!" The pain splintered through her leg and she stumbled against the dark-haired girl, who dropped the incense burner. For a single moment, Ginny's mind was clear. But that moment was enough. She screamed and ran in the other direction. 

No escape there. The _Fenestra _charm protecting the window took the place of glass; it barred anything from entering or exiting while allowing fresh air in. But Ginny might have jumped through a window, even if she would cut herself to shreds on the glass while doing it. A _Fenestra_ charm could only be de-activated in case of fire. Pansy realized it too. A malicious grin spread over her face. She reached for the other girl. Without thinking, Ginny stumbled backwards, against the window frame. She tumbled through it. 

For a wild instant, grabbing at nothing, all she could think was that this should not be happening; she should not have been able to get through. Then her feet found a ledge beneath the first floor window. She huddled on it, hands splayed against the wall. The ground looked terrifyingly far away. But she'd have to jump. No! She_ couldn't _jump; she could just barely see Pansy and Goyle running out towards the lawn below! Now they were stopping to argue... oh, they must not have seen her yet, but they would soon... She'd have to climb. Ginny squeezed her eyes nearly shut, focussing only on the next handhold above her. She _must not_ look down. 

Her fingers found a crevice above her. She pulled herself up, the muscles of her arms screaming in protest. Now her other arm. Now her left leg. Now her right. She scrabbled at the stone wall and found a toehold. Inch by inch, she forced herself up the side of the castle. Once, her right foot came down on a cornice that crumbled away at her touch, and for a heartstopping moment she was swinging through space. But then her toes caught on a loose brick and she regained her footing. _My balance is better than it was_. she forced herself to think. _Maybe I'll try out for the Quidditch team next year_. At last, she reached the second floor window, just outside the empty corridor. She could dimly see the corner of a large stone gargoyle. That was the entrance to Professor Dumbledore's office; she'd never been there, but had heard Harry and Ron talking about it several times. Maybe, by some miracle, he'd still be here. She pushed up on the windowsill. It was locked. 

Ginny did not allow herself to sob and scream in frustration. If she started, she'd never stop, and she'd use up the last of her strength. She desperately needed every bit of it to get to the third floor. She forced her whimpering muscles the rest of the way up. Her fingers seized at a window and pushed, and it opened with a creak. 

Ginny wriggled through and onto a stone floor, where she simply sat for a moment, gasping for breath. She was in the long, narrow armor gallery. It was absolutely still and very dark; the only light was cast by the full moon shining through the windows that broke the row of silent metal figures at intervals. She tiptoed past them as quietly as she could. The only hope now was to try to sneak up to the seventh floor, back to the Fat Lady's portrait hall, and into the Gryffindor dormitory. There, she'd pack a suitcase... and then what? Ginny refused to allow her mind to go past that point. 

There was a sudden, incredibly loud metallic sound. Ginny stuffed her fist into her mouth to stifle a scream. Her eyes darted toward the source of the noise. A suit of armor had turned and was pointing towards the door. She turned to look, but a hand clapped over her mouth and dragged her into the corridor. 

At first, she thought it must be Crabbe or Goyle, but after the first instant of fear she knew it wasn't. Whoever was holding her was much smaller, shorter and lighter. She wrenched her head around and saw a round face, strands of straight brown hair, and an ingratiating smile. 

It was Colin Creevey. 

"Oh no," she moaned. She started to struggle, her elbows flailing, and nearly squirmed out of his grasp. "Let go of me this minute! I'll hit you again! I'll--"

Then she felt the wand pressed into her ribs. "Sorry," Colin said with a note of genuine apology in his voice. "I_ really _hope that you're not going to make me use this."

A wand. Colin's wand. About ten inches, she thought detachedly, and very hard, ebony maybe, or mahogany. She didn't seem to have hers. It must be back in the hospital wing. 

"_I honestly _think," Colin continued, "that if _we_ could just talk this out, without those dumb goons around, you'd see things the right way. I don't know _why_ they sent_ them_."

"Them?" she asked carefully. 

"Crabbe and Goyle, of course. Pansy too," said Colin. 

"You-- knew," Ginny said slowly. "You knew they're here."

"Of course I knew. It's _so_ unnecessary," said Colin. "You're a reasonable person. They don't need to send _kidnappers_ and all that sort of thing. This isn't an American police movie, after all."

"Who sent them?"

Colin began walking her down the hall. The tip of the wand pressed into her side at every breath, like a poisoned dart. "I always thought you should have been told about the plan at the _beginning_," he said in a conversational way. "It'd be easier now if you had been." He stopped at a large painting hung on the wall next to the trophy room. "Isn't that_ beautiful_?" he asked. 

Ginny looked at it. The painting showed Hogwarts, castle and grounds, yet not quite as she knew them. The castle was smaller; there were no rose gardens, and no clock tower, and it was surrounded by a low, broken wall with battlements like giants' teeth on top. The Forbidden Forest seemed larger, much larger, darker, more menacing. As she stared, the trees waved like figures in a giants' dance, their limbs lashing over the Quidditch pitch. "Yes," she said. "It's lovely. What is it, Colin?"

"Hogwarts as it once was." He pointed to a small brass plaque at the bottom that read _A Darker Shade of Hogwarts, 1566. _Its edge was outlined in tiny rubies. There was a signature scrawled into the canvas above that, but Ginny couldn't read it. "And as it will be, for_ some_ of us. _I_ have to stay _here_, though, hardly seems fair, does it?"

"No, I'm sure it's not." Ginny fought to keep her breathing even. Colin had obviously gone quite mad. Or had he? His words seemed to make no sense at all. But what if there was a meaning in them that she couldn't yet grasp?

"I really think that if I go back _with_ you, I can talk to them and they'll see reason. They'll let me come as well. _Horrible_ to be left out of things, isn't it?" He moved closer, and when he spoke, his lips brushed her skin. She fought not to recoil. "_They_ thought you shouldn't be told a thing because of Ron being your brother, and Harry and Hermione being your friends. But that lot wasn't ever really your friends, were they? You were just Ron's little sister, unimportant, a tag-along. I know how _Harry_ is especially. I fooled all of you, didn't I? You must've thought I still admired him so much, worshipped him really. But _now_ I know him for what he is-- a stuck-up prat who thinks he's too good for everybody else." His face flushed an alarming shade of red, and an ugly expression was spreading across it. 

"You're so clever, Colin, of course you knew," Ginny said as soothingly as she could. 

He grinned, seemingly in a good humor once again. "I _am_, aren't I? Clever... cunning... The Sorting Hat wanted to put me in Slytherin, you know, back in first year. Nobody knows that-- anyway, I _told_ them and_ told _them about how resentful you must feel. I stuck up for you, Ginny; I _always_ said that you'd turn to the right side, given half a chance."

Ginny bit her lip and forced herself to look admiringly at Colin, her eyelashes fluttering slightly. "I'm sure you did," she said in a breathless voice. "But who, Colin? Who did you tell?"

"I wasn't supposed to say," he said, but his voice had a slight bragging tone to it. 

_He said that Peter had always liked having big friends... powerful friends, who'd take care of him... _She'd overheard Harry saying that to Ron once in the Gryffindor common room; it was very late at night and they hadn't realized she was there. Whoever Peter might be, the statement certainly summed up Colin Creevey. A hideous answer to her question was starting to shape up in Ginny's mind. But she had to know for sure. 

"But it's safe now," said Ginny. "You can tell _me_." She gave him a little smile. 

"The inner circle," he said proudly. 

"Of--?"

"Death Eaters. Avery, Notte, McNair, Lestrange, Pettigrew, Crabbe and Goyle's fathers... and, of course, _Lucius Malfoy_." Colin's scrawny chest actually puffed out slightly at his last words. 

"Ohhhh," said Ginny, her eyes going wide. She desperately hoped that the leap of terror in her voice could be passed off as awe at Colin's connections. She was right, oh God, she was right! "Draco Malfoy too?"

"Well, naturally," Colin shrugged. "But you don't have to be afraid. I'll protect you. I know _he's_ the one who came at _you_ on the balcony last night, and_ Disinhibio_ can cause all sorts of strange reactions-- dreadfully sorry that was one of them, but I knew you just needed that extra little push to see what was really in your heart about things--"

"You're so right, Colin," said Ginny. "You didn't have to tell Ron that silly story this morning, you know." She pouted. 

"Well, we couldn't have him going off half-cocked and heading for Malfoy Manor to kill Draco, now could we?" Colin's hand stroked her hair, and she dug her nails into her palms to keep from scratching them down his arm. "Couldn't let the _real_ aides come from St. Mungo's for you, either. It was so _easy_; Malfoy just intercepted the owls, that's all we had to do... They're hopelessly disorganized over there; it'll take them_ days _to sort out that you didn't show up. But I never liked Crabbe and Goyle being sent." 

"I'm so glad _you_ found me," she whispered. They were out in the main corridor and nearly to the large marble staircase now. She manuevered him towards it. She felt his wand relax slightly against her side. 

"I think I like you better this way," he said. "You're not so shy as you were, Ginny."

She giggled. "I suppose I'm not." She glanced around the hallway. "Surely we have a _few _minutes, Colin?" Ginny could hardly believe the words that were coming out of her mouth, but she prayed that she'd be able to keep things up in this vein just a bit longer. _It's like playacting in front of the mirror at home_, she told herself firmly. _I'm playing a part, that's all; it's like ... Cherry Delight. _Arthur Weasley had rigged up Muggle electricity at their home in Ottery St. Catchpole once, years ago; and he'd gotten hold of a television from somewhere. They'd watched a crazed assortment of programmes for a week before her mother had made him disconnect it. Ginny had sat eight hours a day hunched on the little sofa in the garage, hypnotized by the flickering screen, devouring everything from _Masterpiece Theatre_ to imports of _The A-Team_. She vividly remembered her favorite series, _Santa Monica Boulevard--After Hours!_, and a seductive character who went by the improbable name of Cherry Delight. _That's who I am, I'm Cherry Delight. What would she do?_

"I don't know..." said Colin uneasily. 

"Oh, just one little minute?" Ginny hooked her hands in the pockets of Colin's robe. "Just one... little bitty... minute..." 

He fell against her with a groan. His wand arm moved down to grasp her body from behind. But he was still trapping Ginny against the wall, and to her dismay she felt the tip of the wand pressing against her still, now wedged behind her. _Oh God, what do I do now? I've only made things worse than they were before! _She tried to shrink back, away from him, but it did no good; he was plastering wet kisses all over her neck and his other hand was grabbing her chest so roughly that she could already feel the bruises rising. She struggled in revulsion, but he only pressed his knee between her thighs and fumbled at the waist of her robes; she could hear a whimpering deep in her throat, and she thought dumbly, _Colin Creevey's going to rape me right here in this hallway, please don't let this happen, oh, please, no, no--_

_"_What the bloody hell is going on?" a shrill voice demanded. Ginny looked up to see the furious face of Ivy Parkinson, her coppery hair gleaming in a shaft of moonlight from a window. Colin looked up at the other girl, mouth gaping, and Ginny took her opportunity to wrench herself away from him. 

"Stop her, you stupid git!" shrieked Ivy, and Colin drew his wand. But he'd been distracted, and that gave Ginny the crucial extra moment she needed. She ran up the next flight of stairs as fast as she could. Even as she ran, she could feel it shifting, leaving Colin and Ivy teetering on the edge below. 

Ginny darted up the next flight as quickly as she dared. Then the next. There was something positively malicious about the way they kept moving to different positions. She jumped onto the bottom step to the sixth floor, stumbling over her own feet with a shriek. An entire section next to a row of marble statues had suddenly swung out into empty space. The high, frantic sound of her own voice echoed throughout the vast darkness. The suits of armor in the halls were moving slightly, and in the dim light, she couldn't see where they were going. On the far wall, a painting of a ship at sea broke into a storm, the prow swooping through the waves, the sails billowing, the mast cracking under a bolt of lightning.The landscape paintings were no longer peaceful and pastoral; they were moving, too. She brushed her hair from her face with a trembling hand so that she could see. Before her eyes, one of them changed to Edvard Munch's _The Scream_. The man with both hands thrown up to the sides of his face was screaming; the river was rolling and flooding; the sky was billowing in dark waves, and tendrils of it crept out towards her as she watched. 

Ginny stuffed her fist in her mouth, afraid that she would start screaming, too, and would never be able to stop. This was Hogwarts, only Hogwarts, her dear, familiar school for the past four and a half years. She was nearly sixteen. Not a baby. She wasn't a superstitious Muggle scuttling through a haunted house. She was a witch, she was powerful, she was confident, she was--

A chuckle of laughter came from behind her. 

Ginny whirled, nearly falling, and saw that the portraits and sculptures lining the corridor had begun to move. They were more terrifying than all the rest put together, and she was going to have to pass every one of them. There was the Greek pantheon--Zeus, Athena, Hera, Aphrodite, and some others she didn't recognize-- draped in togas in a marble frieze, hung on the wall. The surface of the blue-veined marble writhed when the deities turned towards her, watching her keenly. Next to them was a bronze sculpture of the Teutonic gods. Donar and Wotan glared at her, Freya turned her face away, and Loki laughed, throwing his head back, fixed into place yet eternally falling through fire, red flames licking at his hair. That was the laughter she had heard. "Gwenhyfar, Gwenhyfar!" he said in a voice filled with mirth. 

"I don't see anything funny," said Ginny. 

Loki suddenly sobered. "The time draws near, and you know it not."

"What time? What's going to happen?"

In answer, Loki waved one of his slender bronze hands, and a flickering spiral design of red and black lines writhed around him like the bars of a twisted cage. Ginny eye was drawn unwillingly to the patterns of inexplicable symbols. She could feel the magic crackling from them, but it wasn't magic of any sort she knew. 

The bronze figure spoke very low, and Ginny moved closer, unwilling yet fascinated, in order to hear him. "Free me, Ginny," Loki said. "Only you can free me."

"You're a statue," she replied. "I can't free you."

"You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you?" The look he gave her from his slanted eyes was sardonic. "Mortals are fools." 

"What do you mean?"

But the Norse trickster god only laughed the more, and Ginny did not look to either side of her after that. The flat painted eyes of the portraits slid towards her where she stood, trembling uncontrollably, and their lips began to speak in mumbled whispers. She shuffled her feet ahead of her, one at a time, inch by inch, her muscles nearly paralyzed by fear. She kept her own eyes fixed frozenly on the dim marble staircase in the distance. 

"Going somewhere?" Ginny's head turned without her volition, and she saw that the slight, graceful figure of Lady Death had spoken to her from a large oil portrait of the seven Immortals. 

"No," Ginny whimpered. She dimly wished that she had the pride to feel ashamed of her own whining voice, but she didn't. "Go away, leave me alone."

"I'm only a painting," said Lady Death. "I can't go anywhere."

Ginny's feet seemed to have slowed to the point where they were moving only in millimetres. "Am I going to get out of this?" she asked. "Am I going to get downstairs? Am I going to get home?"

"You're going to get a lifetime," said the Lady. "That's all anybody gets." Then she turned away from Ginny towards her black-clad brother Dream, who was standing motionless in the clearing of a great rolling forest with the wind whipping his spiky dark hair, and she spoke no more. 

Ginny passed a portrait of the Four Founders without daring to glance at it. She thought she saw Salazar Slytherin sneer something at her from the corner of her eye. But at that moment she wouldn't even have trusted the painted image of Godric Gryffindor. Almost to the end of the corridor, almost there. 

"Hurry!" a chorus of shrill voices shrieked. Ginny forced her legs to move forward, and saw the last portrait on the wall, one of three girls in sweeping dark green dress robes. They all stared up at her from a wild green landscape, red, gold, and coal-black hair tumbling about their shoulders. Their faces had a vague likeness to each other, and something about them nagged at Ginny, although she could not have said what it was. Two of them wore gold and silver lockets about their necks, flashing as all three leaped to their feet. "Gwenhyfar, you must hurry!" said the red-haired one. "They are leaving, your brother and your friends."

"How do you know--" gasped Ginny. 

"Run! Run!" The girls pointed down the hall, but Ginny had already started running up the stairs. "Not that way..." It was too late. 

Ginny skidded to a halt in front of the portrait of the Fat Lady. "Password, password," she muttered in despair. "I can't remember the password!" 

"Seeing as it's you, dear," the subject of the painting yawned in an irritated way, "I'll just let you through. Goodness, I thought everyone was gone by now. I was looking forward to a nice, long, uninterrupted sleep, but such, alas, is apparently not to be--"

"Now! Please!"

The Fat Lady rearranged a fold of her pink lace dress. "A truly refreshing sleep, unbroken by students sneaking in from the Astronomy Tower at one in the morning... I can scarcely imagine what that would be like anymore..." 

Ginny began clawing at the painted surface with her hands. 

"Goodness!" The portrait swung open, revealing a large, round hole, which Ginny scrambled through. "There's really no need for that sort of thing, dear," the Fat Lady called after her. "I was just going to tell you that--" She glanced over her shoulder. "There seems to be someone coming up the stairs." But Ginny was much too far down the hall to hear her. 

Ginny threw a suitcase on the bed and started tossing clothing into it, her toothbrush, soap, shampoo, moisturizer. Gilderoy Lockhart's fatuous face winked up at her from a bottle of hair depilatory lotion. "Not even an eentsy-weentsy trace of stubble for two whole weeks!" he said in a smarmy voice. 

"Shut it," Ginny said rudely, slamming the suitcase's top down on his toothy grin. Now to get to the back staircase, the one that wound down all the way to the kitchens. That was something she'd discovered herself, during her night wanderings this autumn when she'd had so much trouble sleeping, and she was very proud of it. Even Harry, Ron, and Hermione didn't know about it. She'd go to the train station, walking if she had to; she still had fifty or sixty sickles, enough for a ticket, she thought. But no; it must be after ten by now, she realized. The last train had already left. Well, she'd get down to the first floor and then worry about it. There must be some way. 

Ginny had taken a number of camping trips in the past few years; her father had become violently enamored of sleeping in a tent after he'd borrowed one for the Quidditch World Cup the summer she was thirteen. Time and again, he'd dragged her and Ron on some dreary weekend tramp through the woods (after realizing that Arthur Weasley was using a Muggle tent for greater authenticity, the rest of the family found terribly important prior commitments rather soon.) They'd cooked over campfires and slept in sleeping bags spread directly over tree roots or on a flood plain, been bitten by nasty bugs and caught poison ivy in extremely inconvenient places, and gotten themselves chased once by what her father always insisted was a bear, but was more likely an ill-tempered badger. The entire thing had renewed Ginny's love for civilization. But she could sleep in the woods and walk all the way to Ottery-St. Catchpole, if she had to. 

_But what then_? If she went home, they'd only send her to St. Mungo's. She couldn't, wouldn't, go back there. No. No. She was seized by a sort of confused memory of slack-faced patients waiting for their daily potions at the nurse's office, dull hopeless faces staring endlessly out of windows, chain-smoking, waiting for something that never came, waiting as life passed them by, and Ginny herself sitting there too, feeling all her strength and health and youth fester and turn in upon her with the savagery of a trapped animal. She'd_ die _first. Ginny hesitated, and in that moment, she heard the footsteps running towards her door. 

"_No!" _hissed Ginny, jumping up frantically. She hit her head on the frame of the tester bed. Moaning, she rubbed her temples with one hand while grabbing her suitcase with the other. She turned and ran through the other door, that one that led to the girls' bathroom, and then down the halls as fast as she could. They were eerily dark, lit only by the faint glow at the end of her wand. She paused to catch her breath, slipping behind a suit of armor. A large shape was moving towards her from one end of the hall. Goyle. Another one, barely seen out of the corner of her eye, was advancing from the other end of the hall. Crabbe. And then the door several metres in front of her opened, and Pansy stepped through it. 

Well, this was it. Ginny closed her eyes, determined not to scream. 

Why weren't they advancing on her? Why didn't she feel Crabbe and Goyle's meaty hands grabbing her arms? Why wasn't Pansy's voice taunting her? Ginny dared to open her eyes a crack. 

The scene before her resembled a frozen tableau, like one of those odd Muggle photographs that didn't move. Crabbe and Goyle had both stopped in mid-step. Pansy's mouth was open in a word she never finished speaking. The very light at the end of Ginny's wand seemed to have paused, to have stopped flickering as it normally did. 

Then something tapped her on the shoulder, and she did scream. "Oh God," she choked, without turning around. "Who-- who is it?"

There was no answer, but she felt a tremendous chill, as if all the warmth in the air had simply been drained away. Slowly, she forced her numb body to turn. Behind her was the Bloody Baron. 

He stared somberly at her out of his pale eyes, the silvery bloodstains on his face and robes more noticeable now, almost fresh-looking. He'd never been so close to her before. The Bloody Baron didn't really even associate with the Slytherins, or any of the other Hogwarts ghosts. He was a solitary being. Except that he sometimes seemed to be talking with Professor Snape in some corner of the dungeons of the other, and, come to think of it, she hadn't seen Snape since the Potions exam that day, which seemed odd, he must've left Hogwarts a bit early... The randomness of her own thoughts was beginning to frighten her, and she forced herself speak again before they spun even further out of control. 

"You did this," said Ginny. "Didn't you?"

The ghost kept looking blankly at her. Could it be that he didn't understand what she'd said? 

"The-- the way they're not moving, the way nothing's moving," she persisted, sweeping her arm past Pansy, Crabbe, and Goyle. "You--" She pointed directly at him. "You did it. I don't understand. I didn't know ghosts could-- are you really a ghost? Who are you?" Her eyes, not only her words, were pleading with him for some sort of explanation. 

The ghost nodded. Then she jumped in surprise as she heard him speak. His voice was rusty and grating, as if from long disuse. "_Ich heisse Lukas von Drachen_," he said. 

"A name, that has to be a name," said Ginny. "You're saying that your real name is-- was-- Lukas von Drachen." Even as she said it, she felt faintly stupid; obviously the ghost's name, when he was living, couldn't very well have been the Bloody Baron. "Well-- thanks awfully, I suppose. I couldn't have gotten away from them if you hadn't done that. Can I-- can I go now?

The ghost put a hand on her arm. It was like the touch of seaweed dragged up from the cold depths of the ocean. "_Wille das Schicksal der Mannwiederholung selbst? Wieder und doch wieder_?"

"I don't understand," said Ginny. "Is that German? I don't speak German." 

The Bloody Baron shook his ghostly head, slowly and sadly. Then he drifted out into the hall. "_Komm mit mir._" 

_That sounded like "come with." He's moving away from me; I suppose that's what he meant. _Ginny hurried to catch up with the ghost. He drifted down the back staircase, and Ginny followed him, guessing that the ghosts, too, must know about its existence. They reached the first floor annex.

"What do I do _now_?" asked Ginny, unable to keep the slight whine from her voice. Too late, she remembered that he couldn't understand her words. But the Bloody Baron turned towards her, although he seemed to have no comprehension in his spectral face. The silvery bloodstains stood out more than ever. Then he spoke the same words he had said to Draco Malfoy the night before, although she did not know it. 

_"Geh, junge Ginny. Geh du zum Schicksal für dich ernannt." _He turned and vanished through the wall. 

Ginny walked out into the great entrance hall next to the massive double doors of oak and stood there, chewing on her lip. _Now _what? Could Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville actually still be here? She didn't hear anyone coming towards her at the moment, but she wasn't about to fool herself into thinking that her pursuers had_ all _given up and gone back home, or wherever they'd come from. The mindless wave of panic threatened to overtake her again, the one she'd felt when Colin was groping at her in the third floor hall. Strange that when Draco Malfoy had been doing almost the same thing not twenty-four hours before, she'd been consumed by such shameful dark pleasure, but with Colin there was only revulsion and terror and--

"Think, Ginny. Think," she repeated to herself. "What would Hermione do?" Something astoundingly clever, no doubt. Ginny felt about as clever as a bag of wet mice. She looked despairingly at the suits of armour flanking the doors. 

One of them turned slightly with a creaking noise. The steel arm raised itself and pointed towards the door on the opposite wall. The one leading to the dungeons. Ginny walked over to it. 

Several strands of gold-brown hair, caught on the rough wood, floated from the open door. Ginny stepped closer to examine it. Hermione's hair. Nobody else's in the school was quite that color, or that texture. But why had Hermione gone down into the dungeons, an area of Hogwarts she normally avoided at all costs? Unless-- unless--

Ginny closed her eyes briefly. Something was pulling her towards the dungeons. The closer she went to the entrance, the stronger the compulsion became. It was so quiet down here that she could hear something rustling in her pocket of her robes as she walked forward. She paused to pull it out. It was the torn half of the parchment she'd gotten from Hermione, the one with the strange drawings and scribblings on it. Something was glowing red in its corner, a scattering of tiny rubies embedded in the page, each one no bigger than a pinpoint. They pulsed with bright color. Ginny couldn't believe that she hadn't seen them before. But then if the jewels hadn't been glowing earlier, they had probably looked like a smudge of reddish dirt. _Oh, I don't want to go down there, down where they're leading me! _

Even as the pull strengthened, going down into the dungeons increasingly seemed to Ginny like the most dangerous thing she might ever do. But staying here was even more dangerous. And the glow of the rubies was suddenly sinister, like a cold light seeping through blood. Maybe just _holding_ them was dangerous. 

Ginny was paralyzed for a moment. But that provided no relief, either. She was being watched; all at once she could feel the eyes on her back with the clarity of hammer-blows, but when she whirled behind her, no-one was there. She pushed tat he door, and it opened further with a squeal of protest. The ruby glow illuminated only a tiny circle near her feet. The rest of the dungeons were in darkness._ I'm a Gryffindor. The Sorting Hat put me in Gryffindor for a reason. I'm brave. I'm brave._ She took a deep breath and plunged forward. 

She tried to fight down the sudden, sure knowledge that invisible footsteps followed her. 

********************************************************************************************************************

Review!!!! Review and I'll think very kindly of you. :)


	8. Pursuit

Chapter Eight. 

Pursuit. 

James Leslie:You have led me a fine chase, but 'tis over now. 

Jasmine de Marisco: Is it?

--Bertrice Small, _Darling Jasmine_

If you recognize it as JKR's, it's hers; if you don't, it's mine or history's. If you haven't read bestselling romance author Bertrice Small (_Skye O'Malley, All the Sweet Tomorrows, Love Wild and Fair, Beloved, Unconquered_, etc.,) you should. Major inspiration for this fic, especially the harem scenes, which, I do assure you, are coming in their own sweet time. So to speak. ;)

Draco held the_ Kitap-an-Dus_ in his right hand. With his left, he fitted into the open binding the torn half of the page he held, the one with Hermione Granger's drawings of inverted cones and enigmatic equations. At the corner of each page before and after it, the scattering of minute rubies glowed with a pulsing light. There was a gap or two; he wondered if there were more pages missing, and where they might be. Each wave of the light cast a brief red glow over the silent figures gathered in the dungeon. He closed his eyes. The red light illuminated the planes and angles of his face, throwing them into sharp relief between the snatches of darkness. "She's coming closer to the Hogwarts tower," he said at last. 

"That's what you think?" asked Lucius Malfoy. 

"That's what I_ know_." Draco groped forward with his hand, toward the rubies, and felt the grainlike gems beneath the sensitive tips of his fingers. He could _feel_ Ginny Weasley's presence through them, although he hadn't the slightest idea how. She was walking through a dark dungeon, her face white and strained with fear. He seemed to see the darkness with her eyes and hear the faint, faraway, echoing dripping of water through her ears. "Hermione," she said in a whimper. "Oh God, where are you?"

"Eleven thirty-five," said a low voice behind him, McNair's he thought it was by the Scottish burr. "The operatives will have tae return soon."

"Can you see anything? Hear anything?" asked Lucius. 

"She's asking where that mudblood Granger is. I think she's talking to herself, I don't hear anyone else," said Draco. 

"What else?"

"Nothing-- I don't think-- wait--" Draco picked up an almost inaudible sound of footsteps. Ginny probably couldn't hear it at all through the sound of her own frightened breathing. "Someone's following her. No--" he forestalled his father's next question "-- I don't think it can be Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy; she'd hear them a kilometre off and so would I."

"Creevey," Lucius said under his breath. "It has to be Creevey. Damn. I told him not to do this-- well, perhaps_ he_ can get her, the other Parkinson girl should be with him--"

"Colin Creevey and Ivy Parkinson are our operatives?" Draco asked, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice. 

"They have been for months." 

"Exactly when was I to be informed of all this?"

"You've known as much as you've wanted to know, Draco."

"And precisely what is that supposed to mean?"

"What have you been doing for the past year and a half?" countered Lucius. "Where have your energies been going?"

Draco winced at his father's old trick of answering a question with a question. In this particular case, however, he couldn't come up with any sort of answer. 

"You might have been helping me," Lucius Malfoy continued in a dangerously soft voice. "It took me well over a year to discover the re-animation spell I used. I went further into the study of Necromancy than any living man has ever gone. It drained my powers nearly past repair. But not quite, my son, not quite, and luckily I did have help.."

_What sort of help?_ wondered Draco. _And from who?_

."Now that our cause is on the rise again, you're happy to return to the fold. But where were you before this?"

Draco could think of no answer to make to that. Should he tell his father that he'd been lying awake in the Slytherin dormitory, night after night after night? Flying his Nimbus 2002 in the cold pre-dawn hours over the Forbidden Forest, swooping and diving and half-hoping he'd damn well crash into a tree and end those endless sleepless vigils? Going through the days as if pixy-mazed, attending classes and taking notes and passing tests with some detached corner of himself, the rest frozen in a sort of suspended animation? Staring out the window of his room and filling page after page of linen parchment with drawings that didn't make much sense, twisted renditions of bird or horse or tree, or disturbing likenesses of the people around him? Towards the end of the past year, he'd been drawing increasingly hideous portraits of the other Slytherins, capturing their malice and cunning and spiritual destitution with a skill that made him deeply uneasy. He'd done only one self-portrait, which he promptly burned. 

Or perhaps, Draco thought, he could simply say, _I've been waiting, Father, waiting. I've been marking time, drifting through the days. And I think I'd rather die than go through that again, that waiting. _

He could have been _doing_. 

But he'd never really believed that a day like this would come. 

"Why don't you admit it?" his father was asking in his chiding, disappointed tone."You'd forgotten yourself, and your duties as a Malfoy, as a von Drachen. You'd forgotten your destiny. I'm surprised you didn't simply cast in your lot with Dumbledore, Potter, and the mudbloods."

Draco raised his head. "I'd _never_ do that," he spat. 

"Maybe not." Lucius paused. "But you did forget."

Yes, he had forgotten. 

Behind him, Draco sensed something very cold, no more than a breath of chill air. He knew it to be the presence of Lord Grindelwald. The Dark Lord wouldn't always apparate to the degree where Draco could see him; it was one of the things he had communicated during the link that afternoon. 

_But you vill always know ven I am here_, the icy voice whispered in his ear, and it was Grindelwald's voice. _Ah, my young apprentice, you did forget._ There was more sorrow than anger in the words. 

"I'm sorry," Draco murmured. "Oh, I'm sorry."

_Nothing has been done, that cannot be undone. _

_"_I don't deserve your forgiveness."

_No need to humble yourself before me in such a vay._ The voice was faintly amused now. _I know you are not humble, my apprentice. You do not need to be. _

Draco couldn't suppress a smirk at that. But even as one corner of his mouth went up, he saw his mother's eyes on him from across the circle, that great blue gaze that always seemed to hold an inexpressible sorrow. She sighed. He blinked. 

"Mother? What is it?"

She shook her head and was silent, but then she was usually silent. Draco was troubled, although he could not have said why. But the dark silk hood of his mother's cloak was drawn over her bent head, and all he could see was the line of her cheek and chin. The moment had been broken somehow, and he no longer felt the link with Grindelwald, at least for now. 

There must be close to twenty people down here, Draco thought. Waiting, suitcases in hand. Prepared to go... where? He had not the faintest of ideas, and curiousity was threatening to get the better of even him. But he'd be damned if he'd ask.

Ginny's feet were cold, he suddenly knew. She had no shoes on. Their tender undersides were bruised on the stones of the dungeon floor, and Draco winced when he felt her pain. She had beautiful feet; small for her height, white and rose, the skin like delicate old satin, the toes slender. He pictured himself washing her feet in a silver basin of rose-scented water, running a cloth over the perfect arch of her instep, drying them with a silk towel. Then kissing each one of those graceful toes and running his tongue along their tops, slowly taking them into his mouth, sucking on them, one by one, moving his lips up to the curve of her ankles, and then--

"Draco," said Lucius. 

"What?" He recovered himself with an effort. 

"You weren't listening."

"I'm listening now," said Draco, not troubling to deny it. 

"I should think you'd appreciate an explanation of what's going on," his father said dryly. 

He nodded, thinking that it was bloody well about time for one. 

"We're Portkeying to the clock tower."

"Seems odd," said Draco noncommitally. "It's close enough to walk."

"Travelling by Portkey first lessens the spatial dislocation. It makes it easier for the human body to adjust to what comes next," said Lucius. 

_The clock tower._.. "I think I already know what comes next." _Is he really telling me I'm going to have go through that again? _Draco remembered the world-consuming pain almost detachedly, but his stomach was clenching into a cold knot. _No, that **can't** be it. Because that would mean he'd have to go through it too, and Father's always been quite a bit more willing to put others through pain than to endure it himself... I should know... no, just stay calm, don't say anything, he **wants **to tell me, it's practically spilling out of him... _

_"_You're mistaken there." Lucius shook his head. "You went one way. We will go another. The opposite direction, in fact. The path you travelled was quite a bit more difficult, I must admit."

"_Difficult_," said Draco with a sneer, "is not the word I'd use."

"It's truly regrettable, but it had to be done. You needed to be untraceable during the journey to Malfoy Manor. You can be hidden by Concealing spells once you're here, but even Portkey leaves a signature. There simply was no other way. Dumbledore himself couldn't have found you between one and ten. And for all we know, he tried."

"So how did I get here?" Draco asked flatly, suddenly tired of all the idiotic games. 

Lucius smiled. "It's not a question of _how_," he said, "but _when_."

_Not how, but when... oh damn him, can't he ever just come out with anything clearly and plainly... _

The clock tower. 

_When.._.

We will go another, the opposite direction, in fact...

_When_...

It is now the year which is in Western reckoning, 1566... 

_When..._

He looked down at the torn half of the parchment in the book in his hands. The diagrams, the cryptic words, past, present, future... the timelines... the_ timelines_... 

And the puzzle fell into place. 

"It's a contained wormhole," said Draco. "A time warp." He drew a shuddering breath, and a great excitement bloomed through him like a dark and poisonous flower. "I went forward a bit, didn't I? That's how I got here. But now we're going back in time. To Istanbul. Potter and the mudblood and that lot are trying to do the same thing, aren't they? And they think they're going to get the Jewel of the Harem. But they're not. We are."

And Lucius Malfoy smiled. It was one of his rare, fleeting smiles that lit up his entire face and gave him a beauty that would have made the fallen angel Lucifer, his namesake, sick with jealousy. "Well done, my son," he said. "Well done." 

*********************************************************************************************************************

Finding them was so much easier than Ginny had thought it would be that she was faintly surprised.

"Ow!" she heard Neville yell almost right away. 

"Honestly, Neville, do watch your feet," said Hemione. 

"I've never liked coming down here," Neville said faintly. 

"Shhh." That was Harry; she'd recognize his voice anywhere, and she easily picked out the fourth set of footsteps as Ron's. They_ were_ all here! Had they perhaps thought that she'd taken the train on her own? No. They knew that she was being sent to St. Mungo's. Ginny knew that with a sudden, chilling sureness. They must have thought that actual aides were coming to get her; she couldn't believe that they would have known what was really going to happen, of course not. But the question still remained, why were_ they _here?

Now they were moving more quickly, turning right, then left, then right again down the twisting corridors of the deepest dungeons. Ginny struggled to keep up. The darkness actually seemed to intensify until she could barely even see her feet by the ruby light, and her bare soles ached from scrambling along the rough stones of the floor. If she lost them now, she might not be found until the holidays were over. God, to be _stuck_ down here for weeks on end, the darkness closing in on her, the rats creeping closer and sniffling about her, and maybe worse things than rats...

Ginny broke into an almost-run. She actually saw the retreating back of Ron's robes by the candle Hermione held in front of him. Then he vanished through a wall. The hall was empty. As Ginny stood, fighting not to break into wild tears, the footsteps following her came closer. She slipped into a broom closet and crouched on the floor, head between her knees, taking deep breaths. 

Through the crack of the open door, she saw the dim outlines of two figures, each also holding a candle. 

"I've lost her. These stupid dungeons," said the voice of Ivy Parkinson. 

"Try a Finding spell," Colin said. 

Ivy pulled out her wand and murmured some words. "Nothing. I might have known. It's too close to midnight; the tower's going to knock out any other sort of magic."

"Where d'you suppose the others are?"

"They've probably left. It's so late." 

Colin reached up a hand and rubbed his face. "Damn, my nose is bleeding again."

"If you don't remember how to cast a Disanguination charm properly, that's hardly my fault." 

"You don't have to be_ snippy _about it."

"I'll be snippy if I please. The only thing we can do," said Ivy, "is to find the door ourselves. She's going to have to move then, and we'll hear her."

"Well, since we're _stuck_ down here, no point in wasting a nice dark dungeon, is there?" Colin turned towards Ivy Parkinson and the candle in her hand. Ginny could see his smirking, lustful face clearly, a sight she could have lived and died happily without. 

Ivy sighed. "Creevey, don't you ever think about anything else?"

His lips paused in their journey towards her neck. "No. Well, photography. I do try to combine the two. It helps to have a darkroom of one's own for that sort of thing."

"What, so you can capture the timeless artistic images of yourself wanking off?"

"Ivy! What about this morning?"

"Quite the most exciting two minutes of my life, I'm sure. Anyhow, I saw you with Weasley! You'd take anyone."

"I do fancy redheads," said Colin. "I'm just following Malfoy's lead in that, you know."

"Likely," said Ivy with a trace of bitterness in her voice. "He never has anything to do with them."

"_You_ don't know that story about him and his French cousin in St. Tropez last Christmas hols, do you?" Colin's voice was very superior. "_She_ was one, I've heard... he loves them, and hates them. Honestly, Ivy, you're better off with _me_--"

The sound of fumbling hands. Then a slap. "Stop it," whispered Ivy. "We've got work to do. It should be right about here." 

Ivy pulled a large glass bottle from beneath her robes. She unstoppered it and shook out something across the wall; Ginny couldn't be sure in the near-total darkness, but she thought it was a glittery substance. It hung suspended in the air much longer than it should have. Then it scattered itself across the wall in a deliberate pattern. It was a door. 

"I knew it," said Ivy with some satisfaction. "A good Revealing potion works every time."

"Calls for a _celebration_, don't you think?" Colin pushed Ivy up against the wall. "Come on, Ivy, a knee-trembler, anything, after_ all_ I've done for the cause--" 

Ivy was trying to push him off her; Colin was pressing her back to the stone, and neither of them was paying much attention to anything else. Ginny wrenched herself out of the closet and ran through the shimmering door. Their yells of surprise followed her into the dungeon. 

Ginny's hands were glowing slightly green from the potion that had rubbed off onto them, and she able to see everything in the room. It was small and cramped, the walls dripped with cold, mossy damp, and there was nothing at all in it except for an old bicycle tyre lying in the middle of the floor. But there was a sharp ozone smell in the air, which was still crackling faintly. Without hesitation, Ginny grabbed the tyre, praying that she'd gotten to it in time. The sudden yank behind her navel told her that she had. But just as the Portkey began to pull her away from the dungeon, she saw Colin and Ivy bursting through the wall and stretching out their hands towards it as well. 

**************************************************************************************************************************************************************

"Ten of twelve," said McNair. "There's nae mair time tae waste, Malfoy."

"We need those operatives back, McNair," said Lucius. 

There was a shuffling of feet and a sound of indistinct murmurs as a nervous restlessness spread through the room. The plan had met a hitch. 

"We'll leave without them if we must," said Lestrange in his high, nasal voice. "This is cutting it too close for my comfort as it is."

"If we leave without the Weasley girl..." muttered Lucius, breaking off in mid-sentence. He seemed to be considering something.

In the pause, the air crackled. Crabbe, Goyle, and Pansy Parkinson Apparated with a pop. Pansy looked furious, Goyle was red with rage, and Crabbe bore his usual resemblance to a block of uncarved wood. No-one else was with them. 

"Where is Ginny Weasley?" demanded Lucius. 

"We lost her," said Pansy. 

"I do not take kindly to failure," Lucius said, but Draco had the odd feeling that he wasn't nearly as angry as he pretended to be. "But there's no time to talk about it now. Come and come quickly." He moved forward, towards a long white silk sheet draped over the obsidian altar. In the still-pulsing light of the rubies, it resembled a winding sheet, a shroud for the dead. The circle closed around it. 

_They don't have Ginny Weasley_, thought Draco with a sort of incredulous fury. _I should've known. Trust that lot to botch it up! Bloody hell! Why didn't they send **me**? I'd have had her back here, all right! _He was filled with the baffled frustration he'd felt when he was ten years old and was told he couldn't go to the grand Christmas gathering of his Malfoy and Tessier cousins in the south of France because he'd had that ignominious Muggle disease, chicken pox. Draco had pouted and whined for weeks, hexing every house elf who came into his room or even walked past his door. How_ dare_ fate keep something from him that he wanted so much? 

But this, of course, was worse; he was nearly seventeen, not ten, and he wanted Ginny in a way that was anything but childlike. The frustrated hunger in his body seemed to follow him all the way through the Portkey. Unbidden, it mingled with his hurtful memories of the scent of salt roses one year before in St. Tropez, and of the dark golden eyes of his cousin, Marie-France Tessier. 

Desire. 

_J'ai envie de toi..._ she had whispered to him, her copper curls falling over her bare shoulders as he knelt before her and she fell back against her bed as if in a swoon.

Deception. 

_J'ai besoin de toi..._

Betrayal. 

_Plus profond, plus forte, vite, vite, mon cherie, mon Draco!_

And, with a great rush in his head like the roar of the sea outside her villa in the south of France, he tumbled into the Malfoy clock tower. 

When Draco opened his eyes again, he was at the bottom of a twisting staircase, the air smelling of dust and old, dried wood. The dark cloaked figures ahead of him were moving steadily up the stairs. 

"I was never comfortable with the idea of using her," his father muttered to Lestrange, climbing the steps directly ahead of him." Never. I certainly do realize why she was... mumble, but too many things might go wrong."

"Oh, I understand. Believe me, I do. I know what you fear." The other man's voice lowered even further and took on an unpleasantly insinuating tone, but then, Lestrange always sounded that way. "Mumble mumble... can be so..._ foolish_, shall we say, at that age..." 

"I quite agree," said Peter Pettigrew's whining voice. 

"Exactly," said Lucius Malfoy. "Exactly. How good it is to find... understanding."

Draco wondered exactly what they were talking about. But then he felt long, icy fingers at his temples, and closed his eyes as a surge of energy drained out of him. _I wonder what sort of effect this is having on me... well, no time to think about it now..._ Lord Grindelwald flickered into shape behind him. An uneasy murmur went up and down the stairs. None of them could see the Dark Lord apart from Draco, but there was no mistaking his presence in the tower. 

Grindelwald asked in a silky voice. "You vould replace Ginny Veasley vith some other girl?"

"It would be simpler," said Lucius. "Ginny Weasley is an unknown quantity in so many ways; there are too many secrets surrounding her, too many mysteries that all my efforts have not been able to crack."

"You believe that Pansy Parkinson vould be better, perhaps?" 

"Yes, yes!" said Lucius, sounding relieved. "She is a known quantity. We need fear nothing... unpredictable with her. With the Weasley girl, on the other hand, anything at all might happen. You know of what I speak." 

Grindelwald shook his head in mock disappointment. "You do not trust me, my friend. How very disappointing that is."

"I don't mean that at all, only that-- ahhh--" Lucius suddenly stopped on the stairs, clutching at his left arm, his face grimacing as if in near-unbearable pain. 

"You have already one mark from your old master," Grindelwald said softly, continuing to drift up the staircase. "You vill soon have mine-- if I believe you vorthy of it."

"I am, my lord, I am!" said Lucius. Draco thought with a faint trace of amusement that his father was starting to sound the way he always had when he used to grovel before Voldemort in the old days. "I mean, I will be, I don't doubt you, never think that--"

"Enough." Lord Grindelwald raised his hand in a sideways motion, and Lucius Malfoy staggered forward, breath hissing through his teeth. "See that you do not, my friend."

Draco caught his father's eye and smiled smugly. "The Dark Lord didn't look pleased, Father," he said in an undertone as the group crowded into the clock room at the top of the stairs. "I thought I'd keep you informed, since, of course, nobody would know apart from myself." 

"Remember what I have told you, my son," Lucius replied. "The unfledged dragon should not try his wings too soon." In the near-total darkness of the clock tower, his face was impassive. _Can you challenge me yet_? it seemed to ask. 

_No..._ Draco thought reluctantly. _Not yet. But the day will come, Father. The day will come._

*************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Ginny was in a small square room with a dirt floor, and a steep spiral staircase went up into darkness before her. She could hear many footsteps clattering up the wooden stairs far ahead of her. Behind her, Colin appeared with a pop and grabbed the back of her robes. Ginny ran up the stairs as fast as she could, ignoring Ivy's hissing as she appeared as well. She stumbled up the stairs, sobbing; once her foot caught painfully on a nail and Colin came within a hairs' breadth of seizing her, but she jerked her ankle loose and his hands closed on empty air. Her thigh muscles burned and the stitch in her side was a burning brand, but she had to keep going, keep climbing. _What am I going to do once I get there_? she wondered. 

Then suddenly Colin's hand seized her. She kept struggling forward, dragging him; Ivy was pulling at her hair and both of them were pushing her on at the same time. They had all reached the top of the stairs. There was a great clockface filling the whole of the far wall, and the clockworks attached to it were making a whirring sound before striking. Ginny elbowed Colin in the neck and he fell back. 

The clock began to strike. Harry, at the head of the group, leaped directly into the clock. Ginny stifled a scream. He had vanished. On the next tolls of the great bell, Ron, Neville, and Hermione followed him. 

Now Ivy was holding Ginny's robes in both her hands, and although she was small and delicate, her nails were very sharp. Ginny thrashed back and forth and managed to break free. Ahead of her, the last person was moving towards the clockface, walking with a limp, and she saw the nimbus of grizzled hair about his head. It was Professor Moody. Then he, too, was gone, on the tenth stroke of the clock. 

Colin's hands were on her again as Ginny desperately tried to go forward. He was holding her back by pulling on all the loose material in her robes. She could hear the beginning of the eleventh toll of the clock. 

"No! No!" she shrieked. "Let_ go_ of me, let--" There was an enormous ripping noise from behind her, and suddenly she was free. Ginny ran forward as fast as she could. The clockface shimmered. The sound of the eleventh toll was beginning to die away. There was no time to think. She launched herself into the air. Behind her, in a last, frantic backwards glance, she saw Colin Creevey, holding her robes in his hands and staring at her with a crestfallen look on his face. 

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

The tower clock at Malfoy Manor had begun to toll. With each of its _basso profundo_ strokes, another group of cloaked Death Eaters went through the clockface. Some, like McNair, Lestrange, and Notte, wore their uneasy, swaggering bravado like a not-too-convincing disguise, their faces tense with the fear they really felt at walking into the unknown. Some, like Pettigrew, Crabbe, and Goyle, were quivering visibly. Some, like Narcissa Malfoy, seemed to show no emotion at all. Pansy followed the blonde woman, biting her lip and casting glances back at Draco. And some were cloaked so heavily that he couldn't yet tell who they were. 

"Have they gone through at Hogwarts yet?" Lucius asked his son in an urgent voice as the clock struck seven. 

"I don't know. I can't tell what Potter and the rest are doing. Only her," Draco replied. 

Then Lucius rushed forward and he was gone too. But Draco still stood, the presence of Lord Grindelwald behind him, somehow knowing that he couldn't leave until Ginny did. The clock struck ten. What in hell was keeping her? He could still feel the bond between him and her like a thin silver thread. Stretching. Stretching. And then, with a lurch, she was through, and he no longer felt her. 

In the space of a heartbeat, Draco knew that he couldn't have been sure he actually would go through with this, not with the memory of the inhuman pain he had felt the last time so fresh in his mind. But Ginny had gone, and where she went, he would go; where she fled, he would pursue. The clock struck twelve. The sound began to die away. And in that moment, he moved forward and followed her through the worlds. 

A/N: Pansy's English words are basically a translation of the Turkish ones. Why does Pansy know a Turkish spell, you ask? Ahhhh..... all will be made clear... 

When Ginny is tapped on the second floor and she asks who it is, the Bloody Baron replies "I am Lukas von Drachen." He then asks her if the fate of man will repeat itself , again and yet again, and tells her, as he told Draco, to go to the doom appointed for her. _Nothing_ like German for expressing the angst-ridden. ;)

So the journey's begun, thank God! Glad that's done; this was a hard chapter to write and it got revised about 8,000,000 times. Now things will just get more and more interesting... ;) Next stop: 16th century Scotland. And don't worry, we'll be getting Draco and Ginny back together in the next chapter! But maybe not the way you think. Just to clarify things a bit, Marie-France is not Draco's first cousin; they're second cousins once removed through their grandparents, so it' s not as weird as it sounds. When he goes through the clock tower, Draco remembers her saying to him, _I want you, I need you, deeper, harder, faster. _Gee, what could she be talking about? Snerk. But why does she look like Ginny? Oh, you'll find out. Eventually. Mwah ha ha. I am so evil sometimes...

Review review review!!! 


	9. Dreamtime

Chapter 9: Dreamtime. 

"She had been taught in her childhood that such dependence on magical arts was wrong. It was allowed to search for a glimpse of light in the darkness, and this she had done; but magic must not become a child's leading strings for walking."

--Marion Zimmer Bradley, _The Mists of Avalon. _

_A/N: Thanks to all the reviewers! I will name you by name in the next chapter! JKR owns blah blah blah, I own bleh bleh bleh.You know the dirll._

The amount of research I did for this was not to be believed. Every detail was researched (not that that's a guarantee it's all correct, but the research was done!) If you really want to know more, email me. I've called the land of gods and immortals, which lay rather closer to the mortal world in 1566, the Dreamtime. (If you've read Irina's wonderful Morrigan trilogy, she calls pretty much the same idea, the Otherworld. As much as I try to be original, I'm sure I owe a lot to her! ;) ) The name comes from the Australian indigenous peoples, who believed that before the creation of the world we see, all of reality lay in the Dreamtime. My interpretation of 16th century Scottish magic is based on research (Ogham is the ancient Celtic alphabet and is based on tree magic) and, well, the time-honored tradition of making things up. The Ballad of Tam Lin is Childe Ballad #39 and are absolutely authentic to the exact area of sixteenth century Scotland where I put Hogwarts (south of Edinburgh and Leith. Yes, I know, this may not be exactly where JKR put Hogwarts. Ahem. But in MY little world... mwah ha.) This traditional song has been recorded by a lot of folkie musicians, like Steeleye Span, Anne Briggs, Frankie Armstrong, and the Watersons, so I figured it wouldn't be too farfetched to have the Weird Sisters do it. And yes, it will be a big plot point later on. BTW. Nothing you read is filler; it's all important,or will be. Soon, I will have a character list on another web page you can refer to in case you get confused by all that's thrown at you. (I certainly do sometimes!! And I'm writing it!) 

Just to clarify things a bit, Ginny is halfway through her fifth year, and the rest are halfway through their sixth. Ginny is fifteen and will turn sixteen in two months; Draco is sixteen and will turn seventeen a few days after the events of this chapter. In some ways, they are far more mature than Muggle teenagers would be at the same age; and in some ways, too, much less so. And don't worry; Marie-France Tessier is NOT Draco's first cousin (they're third cousins once removed,) and this is NOT their love story; Ginny is his passion and obsession. But she's important. You'll understand when we get to the detailed flashback of Draco's past year, a couple of chapters from now. Now that's a chapter that will earn its R. ;) 

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When Ginny had come home after being released from St. Mungo's the summer after her first year, she had been exhausted in body, sick in mind, sick in soul. If she even had a soul any longer, which she doubted. It had rained all that August, and she had spent a great deal of time sitting at the desk in her room and staring out at the gray dreary landscape. At last, she had taken to her bed, mumbling something about being ill. She understood later that she had been very ill indeed. 

She'd had a strange Muggle flu that responded to no charm or potion. The mediwitch had told her parents, privately, that Ginny had no resistance left. Their frightened eyes had absorbed the unspoken truth. Their daughter might not survive. It was only after she'd recovered that Ginny understood how terribly afraid everyone had been for her, and it touched her. At least, to the degree that anything could touch her anymore. When Ginny had lain in her bed day after day, however, burning with a fever nothing could quench, everything had seemed blessedly calm. She'd floated on an untroubled sea, letting her very self drift away across the uncharted waters, forgetting both love and grief. She had floated very far. 

She could actually feel the faintness of the silver thread that still connected her to land. It had frayed to the point of breaking, and there was a great light on the far shore. In the boat with her was a beautiful dark girl with an Egyptian ankh around her neck and a smile of such surpassingly sweetness that Ginny woke from dreams of it, long after, with tears upon her face. 

_Lady Death, Lady Death_, she had whispered, _take me with you, enfold me in your last long embrace, and we will sail to the shore where there is no darkness. _

But the girl had only shaken her head. 

Ginny had lived, of course, and returned to the greyness of the world, the world that was like dust and ashes in her mouth. She sometimes wondered if she would have come back at all if it hadn't been for Ron, who sat at her bedside all day and all night until her mother would pull him away and put him, protesting, to bed. Her brother's hand had held hers for hours upon hours, anchoring her almost against her will to the dreary earth. But she never forgot the endless peace of drifting, drifting towards the sweetness of death. 

Traveling through the clock tower was just like that. 

For a timeless stretch of time, Ginny floated bodiless through space. 

Something formless seized at her and pulled the breath out of her lungs. The drifting peace vanished instantly. She struggled against the thing, panicked, flailing blindly in a void. "Let go! Let go!" she sobbed, wordlessly. 

And then she hit a dreadfully hard, bumpy surface and skidded across it, coming to rest behind something very large. She lay still, her arms and legs splayed out, struggling for breath. Someone else was breathing loudly as well, gasping for each lungful of air. Ginny scrunched herself behind the thing and peered around it. Her own head seemed to be sloshing around in a sea of dizziness, and her bare feet burned with cold. 

The other person was Hermione, lying still as death on the other side of a grass-covered mound. A tumulus, Ginny thought, like the ones in Ireland. It rose too abruptly from the earth to be entirely natural. The moon rode high in the night sky, but it was nearly at the full, spilling its cold white light across her friend's prone body. Hermione's eyes were closed and her eyebrows were shockingly dark against her pale face. Ron knelt next to her, shaking her by the shoulder. 

"Come on, Hermione, wake up! You've got to wake up, you can't be-- oh please, you can't be--" His face was white, too, and his eyes were full of fear. 

"Mmm," said Hermione. 

"Sit up," said Ron, his voice shaky with relief. 

"Can't." She fell back into his arms, her body limp. He shook her. 

"Talk to me. Say something in that bossy voice of yours so I know you're alive."

"I am_ not_-- bossy--"

"Tell me how we got here."

"Can't-- hurts--"

"Hermione!" Ron's voice grew sharp. "Come on, you know I'm just a stupid prat who doesn't understand this sort of thing. You need to explain it to me. "

"Magic wormhole." Hermione's voice grew stronger. "What Muggles call a time machine. Professor Moody found out about the Jewel of the Harem-- how the times were drawing together, and the great evil was at hand. He agreed to take us. We're--" She sat up slightly and looked about her. "We're here," she breathed. "It worked. Oh Ron, it worked!" But the effort of speaking started her coughing, and she closed her eyes again, leaning against him. 

"Hermione, don't go out on me now," Ron said urgently. "Uh-- why isn't there a clock tower? I'm dumb and I don't understand."

"Because there isn't any clock tower until next year. Honestly, Ron! You never did read _Hogwarts: A History_, did you?"

"All right, if it worked, where are we?"

"Hogwarts... I think... it is the Forbidden Forest, isn't it?" she asked uncertainly. 

"Far as I know." Ron shrugged. "This is the clearing, all right."

Ginny looked overhead, holding her head between her two hands in an attempt to control the wrenching vertigo that resulted. The oak trees surrounding her were all old beyond measuring, gnarled and twisted dark shapes. Surely such trees would have been marked out as a source of earth magic, and all the students would have seen the grove, or visited it with a Herbology class, or at least heard about it. The air was utterly fresh and cold and clean; she could hear the caw of ravens overhead, and the great trees around the clearing stood still and watchful. Something was different. Very different. Suddenly, she was sure that no place like this existed at the Hogwarts she knew. The knowledge made her feel as if something was creeping just beneath her skin, ready to strike. She squeezed her eyes closed briefly. 

"We really did it," said Hermione. "And it's Yule, or nearly, it must be. I can feel the strength of the magic right now." She still leaned up against Ron, but Ginny had a rather strong feeling that it was from choice, not necessity. Her friend's eyes looked searchingly into those of her brother. "You were really that worried?"

"Well, yes," Ron said casually. Only Ginny, who knew him so well, saw the faint trembling of his hands. "Moody couldn't find a sixth for the team. We really can't afford to lose anyone else."

"I don't understand why it happened at all." Hermione's voice was very irritated, and Ginny thought she heard a faint thread of disappointment. _Oh, Hermione, if you'd grown up with him you'd know what that tone of voice really means! "_It felt as if something reached out towards us and sucked every bit of energy out of me, and it shouldn't have...It would be different if we hadn't been going into the past." 

_If we weren't-- **what**?_ Ginny sat bold upright and was rewarded by a spinning right in the center of the stomach that slumped her back to the ground. 

_"_Yes, I know. 'The future splits into an infinite diverging series,'" Ron quoted in a sing-song voice. "'The human body, at its cellular level, attempts to split as well, to follow each of the possible futures. To travel any stretch beyond a few hours into the future is to court almost certain death. Backwards time travel, however, is a very different matter. According to Steven Hawking's theory of--'"

"All right, I believe you read the book." Hermione cuffed Ron lightly on the arm. 

"You must feel better, you're hitting me. You abusive wench, you," said Ron, and then he leaned down and kissed her, slowly, lingeringly. Ginny looked away discreetly. 

"Wench. Humph," sniffed Hermione. 

"We're in the sixteenth century now. Didn't they use words like that?"

"We're supposed to talk to the people of 1566 as little as possible, remember?" Hermione sighed and leaned back against Ron. "I suppose I'm all right, really. I might have known I'd have the most problems with the trip. At least we all used the Portkey first. That helped, so the dislocation of space wasn't so bad."

1566. 1566. Ginny knew she needed to come out from behind the bramble bush, to tell them she was here, but everything she had heard seemed to be rooting her feet into the ground. 

_1566. _

Over four hundred years in the past. It wasn't possible. 

The parchment. The timelines. The weird drawings of inverted cones and hex-signs and mathematical equations. 

But it couldn't be, it just couldn't. Ginny knew about time-turners; Hermione had explained them to her, but this was magic more forbidden than all the dark arts put together. 

--but--

She understood, now, what they had all been keeping from her. Understood the whispered conferences in dark corners of the halls, the low murmuring in Hermione's room late at night when Ginny crept down the corridor and pressed her ear against the door, trying to hear; understood the blank faces they were forever turning to her, the conversations that stopped the instant she entered the room, the sheer weight of secrecy. And Professor Moody-- The very thought that a teacher had organized this thing made her blood run cold. How? When?_ Why?_

And what was this mysterious thing they had mentioned, the Jewel of the Harem?

She focussed her ears. They were continuing to speak. 

"Has anyone ever actually tried to go into the future?" Ron asked curiously. 

"A few times. There was a horrible experiment some dark wizard or other did at the end of last summer. They sent house elves one day ahead." Hermione shuddered. "About half of them died."

"Who was it?" asked Ron. 

"Let's just say that the Ministry of Magic brought Lucius Malfoy in for some friendly questioning."

Ron's eyebrows shot up almost to the roots of his dark red hair. "Really? Do you suppose--"

"They were never able to prove anything. I doubt they tried very hard."

They were silent for a moment, and Ginny was gathering her strength for another attempt at getting up when Hermione spoke again. 

"Oh God," she said. 

"What? Are you feeling worse?" asked Ron with a sudden catch in his voice. 

"No. I know why it happened!"

Hermione leaped to her feet and stood unsteadily. "Harry! Neville! Professor!" she called in a voice filled with urgency. 

Ginny heard the sound of footfalls on the frozen turf and, looking up, saw Neville running from the opposite direction, Professor Moody following them more slowly, stumping along on his pegleg. Harry followed him, moving very unsteadily and holding his head. 

"We got through," Neville was saying excitedly. "All of us, we managed it! I don't mind telling you that I was a bit worried, I was pretty sure I'd never make it--"

Harry covered his face with his hands. "For the love of God, Neville, don't talk. My brains are coming out my ears as it is."

"Oh. I'm sorry." Neville wilted. "You know, whenever anyone tells me to shut up, I always shut up. Gran always said that I was very good at shutting up; she'd say, 'Neville, my dear boy, your capacities may be limited, but you certainly do know when to shut up,' and--"

"Everyone all right?" growled Professor Moody, leaning on a staff. He looked none too steady himself, and the bottom edge of his dark cloak swayed. They were all wearing the same kind of shapeless black cloak, Ginny realized, and they each carried a bulky cloth pack. Hermione was clutching onto hers, shaking her head repeatedly as if to clear it and trying to speak again. 

"Professor--" she said shakily. "Listen to me, please, I just realized something--" Ron reached up to put a hand on her arm and she shook it off. 

"She's in some sort of shock," he said with a hurt look. 

"I am most certainly not in shock!" snapped Hermione. 

"When you bring along a witch as brilliant as Miss Granger, you'd best listen to her," said Moody. "What is it?"

"The Malfoys and the Death Eaters are right behind us," she blurted. Neville jumped at least two feet in the air and Harry gripped his wand tightly. "No, I don't mean like that!" she added impatiently. "I don't mean they're here this minute. But they're coming after us. They have to be. I felt this-- awful loss of energy when I was going through, did any of you feel it too?"

The others looked at her, their anxious faces alternately concealed and revealed by the clouds scudding past the moon. 

"Yes, I suppose I did," Harry finally said, "but that might have meant anything."

"I know what it means, what it has to mean." Hermione took a deep breath. "They're tracking us."

Moody nodded. "They're traveling on our time signature. Malfoy Manor has one of the four clock towers on the circuit; they can all be used, but it's only the Hogwarts tower a wizard could be tracked from. And that's what they did. We knew this might happen; our sources of information may not know all we could wish, but Lucius Malfoy's been trying to do the same thing we've been doing for over a year now. And you might just as well put those away," he added, glancing at the four wands drawn from their holsters. Their owners all stared at the grizzled professor as if he'd gone mad. 

"They don't work here," Moody added, in slightly gentler tones. 

"They don't-- what?" squeaked Neville. 

"Go on. Try."

Neville looked as if he was rather beyond the ability to recall his own name, much less any spells, but at last he said "_Lumos_" in a quavering voice. Nothing happened. 

"Out of the way," said Ron impatiently, pointing at a patch of dry leaves on the ground. "_Incendio_." They did not burst into flame. His face blanched. "Harry? I reckon there's something wrong with my wand. Try yours."

"All right," said Harry. "Something easy.. ah... _Accio_ Hermione's backpack." The bag stayed on the ground. 

"What's wrong?" asked Hermione. "Did time travel have some sort of effect on our wands? Or-- oh!" She put her hand to her mouth. 

Moody shook his head. "Magic works in the context of a specific time and place. Don't know if you've all learned this yet, but Granger knows, I'd say. The matrix for these wands is over four hundred years in the future. A different world, really, and you'll learn that all too well-- a little book studying could never tell you how different it really is here. For one, wizards and witches in 16th century Scotland rarely use wands, and in the Ottoman Empire they don't know what they are. So yours don't work, and they won't work."

"Well then, what's the bloody point of doing anything?" Ron demanded angrily. "We can't stand against the Malfoys and the Death Eaters without wands!" He leaped to his feet none too steadily and placed himself in front of Hermione, as if to protect her from dangers lurking unseen behind every bush and tree. Moody held up a hand. 

"If they're tracking us then they couldn't leave until after we'd started to go through the wormhole. So they started out behind us and they'll stay that way. Perhaps no more than an hour, but if we leave now we'll be all right. There's a carriage waiting for us just outside the grounds; I arranged for it when I was last here."

"In Hogsmeade?" asked Harry. 

"Yes-- the only other way out is through the Forbidden Forest. And the Forest you know is an amusement park compared to the one that you see now, in 1566."

The night pressed in around them, and the trees seemed to leaning closer, listening. Moody looked at them all with keen eyes. "It isn't safe to stay even here too long. There's too much magic, and it isn't magic we know or understand; too close to the feast of Yule, too many eyes might be watching us, and not human eyes, either... We've got to leave. The_ Ban-Righ _sails in three days at low tide from Leith, and we'd bloody well better be there." He turned around and began stumping off in the other direction almost before he'd finished speaking; Neville helped Harry, Ron, and Hermione up, one by one, and they followed along a winding path that led away from the clearing. Now was the moment to reveal herself. Ginny quailed at the thought of the shocked faces and furious questions. But there was nothing else for it. She stood. 

The world tilted away from her feet so swiftly that she barely felt her head hit the ground, or the brambles scratching along her arm, as she fell into darkness. 

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Review review! More soon! 


	10. Rhiannon

Chapter 10.

Rhiannon. 

Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna. 

--_Goddess Chant_, Deena Metzger. 

A/N: Thanks to all the reviewers, esp.Troglodyte, Suli, BlueEyes, Adie, Lyta Padfoot, Carolanne O'Rourke (that was the BEST review!!!), ArrA, Supergirl, Cappy_22, Sparklyglove, Arafel, Eliza,Persephone, Avanti, Jana, Catalina Royce, StarEyes (please!! check out her artwork, her Draco is just edible!! I don't have the link--well-- email her!!), LadyJade, Eruesse, RavenBlack, Acacia, Allie, Julianka, JoJo (whose fic"The Promise" is amazing,)Gryffindor-girl 2002,Yin, VirtualFaerie, VioletJersey (who is always wonderful!), and Kyran. 

A Note: Chapter 11 will come out very quickly too, and then there will be a LITTLE bit of a longer wait for Chapter 12-14. That's when Draco and Ginny get back together again; I'm writing it right now. I swear to God the room is getting hotter when I'm working on those chapters. Just thought I'd drop a little evil hint... ;) 

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Ginny awoke to a bitterly cold wind blowing through her hair, and she shivered deeply. She couldn't have been unconscious long or she'd have frozen to death, but there was no trace of Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville, or Professor Moody. Slowly, she sat up. Her weakness and dizziness were gone, but she felt curiously empty and unformed. She looked around, now noticing things she hadn't seen before. The trees were black and bare and skeletal, but-- she blinked-- she could see larkspur and bluebonnets growing at the edge of a stream running through the edge of the clearing and into the woods. The gurgling sound of the water made Ginny realize how terribly thirsty she was. She walked to the stream and dipped her hands into it, slurping up the most delicious water she had ever tasted, rinsing her face and wiping it on her white cotton blouse. She'd drunk her fill before she realized that the water wasn't frozen, wasn't even particularly cold. The earth where she stood was warm, too. But when she took a few steps away from the edge of the forest, the rock-hard ground bit icily at her bare feet again. 

Every one of the fine blonde hairs on her arms rose in a purely instinctive reaction of animal fear. The blood along one arm had dried, she saw now; she tried to wash it off, but scraping at the injured skin only made it sting unbearably. Ginny studied her blurred reflection in a still pool at one edge of the stream, trying desperately to find something familiar, something that might calm her a little. But she looked indescribably strange to herself, her face white and terrified. Then she saw what was behind her. 

A curved stone wall loomed up to the midnight sky, surrounding a castle, and on the ramparts stood archers, their bows at the ready. 

Ginny could hear her heart thumping, thumping, thumping through her chest. She forced herself to turn as slowly as she could, her hands raised in the air. The defenders of the walls wore some sort of leggings and leather jerkins, with lengths of differently colored plaid wrapped about them and held by silver pins. Their hair was long and dark, and their faces were very fair but without any expression at all. Then they let their arrows fly. The _tock!_ sound seemed to reach her ears very, very slowly. She was so paralyzed by fear that she literally couldn't move a muscle, although she thought later that staying still was probably the smartest thing she could have done. The arrows passed so close to Ginny's head that she could feel a breath of air on each side of her hair. Then they lodged harmlessly in the ground. 

The tallest archer raised her head; Ginny could already see that it was a woman. And although she could never remember quite seeing how, the huntress seemed to come down from the wall all at once, without taking any noticeable time in doing it. Then she was walking towards Ginny, perhaps ten yards away. Now, by a trick of the light, she seemed to have come from the grass-covered mound. A hollow hill, Ginny remembered. _The domain of the faerie folk. Wish I'd paid attention in History of Magic class that day._ Looking at her, Ginny felt the stirring of some magic so alien to her own that it set shivers down her back. _I thought I was so clever at schoo_l, she thought wonderingly, _but I really learned so little at Hogwarts. Spells and potions and wand-waving... but this... but this... _

Ginny watched the woman, her brows knitting. The longer she stared, the more indistinct the archer's appearance was. It was as if she moved in a nimbus of Confundus charms. At first Ginny thought she looked like Lady Death in her dream, or vision, or whatever it had been; then she didn't, and she was never able to make up her mind on that point. 

When she was nearly face to face with Ginny, the woman stopped. The air before her shimmered and steadied. Her eyes were pools of blackness, and her dark hair streamed down her back beneath a long black veil. Her robes fell in dark folds with shimmers of crimson light. On her forehead was the full moon, painted blue. 

She was the figure Ginny had seen in the Priestess card when she had done the Tarot reading in Professor Trelawney's office the day before. 

"What do you here, Gwenhyfar?" she asked. Her voice was musical and deep, almost too deep for a woman.

Ginny gaped. The full moon shone overhead, and she was undoubtedly standing on a patch of grass in a forest. She could feel her stomach rumbling with hunger, and the bottoms of her bare feet were cold, a little sore from walking on the hard ground. She stepped away from the creek at the edge of the forest, and a wave of bitter cold hit her. She pinched the underside of her arm surreptitiously. It hurt. This was real. Real. Yet here she was talking to a woman from a Tarot card. "I--I came with my friends," she said stupidly. 

"Ah." The woman regarded Ginny. She moved a little, her hair falling back slightly, and Ginny saw that it was fastened behind her with a black velvet band. 

She ran through every magical category in her head, trying desperately to find something familiar, some peg to hang this woman on. Ginny knew that she wasn't a veela or a Norn or a cailleach, not a Valkyrie, nor a zombi. She'd never actually seen any of these beings except for a veela anyway, and that was only because Fleur Delacour had come from France to visit her brother Bill last summer holidays. But it was impossible, too, to get any sort of fix on her. The woman's face seemed to be constantly shifting and changing, as if her flesh were only a thin veil of matter fixed over what she really was, whatever that might be. One moment her hair was dark; the next it flashed gold, red, and even grey; her eyes glinted blue or green, and then were fathomless darkness again. "Who are you?" she finally asked. 

"I have many names. But you may call me Rhiannon, when I take on this form for your eyes," said the woman, a faint smile upon her face. "That name will do as well as any other."

Ginny knitted her brow, dimly remembering a long-ago lesson. _Rhiannon... that means "great queen" in some language or other, the old Cornish tongue maybe..._ "Are you the Queen of the Faerie Folk then, lady?" 

"I have dominion over this place," Rhiannon said. "But beware of trusting what you see, Gwenhyfar. The eyes may be deceived." 

"Why did you shoot at me?" Ginny asked flatly. 

Rhiannon raised her eyebrows mockingly, as if this foolish mortal girl had just shown that she was utterly unaware of the proprieties of a conversation such as this-- although Ginny could never have said how, she knew that the woman was neither mortal nor human. 

"You missed," Ginny continued, feeling a bit like a first-year Hogwarts student sticking her tongue out at Voldemort.

"Missed?" Rhiannon made a gesture with her hand, turning. An archer from the top of the ramparts let an arrow fly from his bow. Before Ginny could move or speak a word, she felt something whizzing past her and thudding into a tree, jerking back her head. She reached up to touch it gingerly. The arrow had gone through the center of her silver hoop earring, pinning her ear to the tree trunk. Her mouth opened and closed several times, but no words would come out. "When my people shoot, they do not miss," said Rhiannon, almost idly. She reached down with strong white hands-- as tall as Ginny was, the woman was a full head taller-- and pulled the earring free. "Come, walk with me." She started down the winding path that Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville, and Moody had used, and Ginny followed her. 

"Your friends have gone before you, unknowing," Rhiannon said in a tone that was almost conversational. "So what will you do now, Gwenhyfar?"

"I-- I don't know," said Ginny. "Why do you call me that?"

"It is your name."

"But--" Ginny couldn't seem to collect her thoughts; they lay scattered about her like spring leaves after a storm. 

They turned a curve in the little path that wound about the tumulus, and the moon shone full on the castle behind the winding wall. Ginny gasped. "It's Hogwarts! But smaller, and not quite so-- it's the Hogwarts in the painting. The painting I saw. That's what it is! It really is 1566."

Rhiannon nodded. "As you would reckon the time."

A blessed feeling of relief swept over Ginny. "It's all right then! All I need to do is to find the headmaster, it's Nicolas Flamel now I think, and he'll know what to do. I can stay here until he can figure out some way of getting me back!" She started towards the great gate in the wall. But a single touch from Rhiannon held her back. The woman's hands were stronger than anything else she'd ever felt. When she looked up, she saw that the archers had their bows at the ready again, arrows pointed towards her. 

"That way is closed to you," said Rhiannon. 

Ginny stared at her incredulously. "You can't mean that. You can't."

"You have a very long road to travel, little Gwenhyfar, before you may return."

"But then where can I go, what can I do?" Ginny pled frantically. 

"You shall do what you must do. You must walk the path fate has appointed to you, through fire and sword, snake and dragon's tooth." Rhiannon's voice grew even deeper than before. "Beware the king who is no king, Gwenhyfar, Gwenhyfar, for that which is whole cannot be divided..."

_That almost sounds like what Professor Trelawney said to me_, thought Ginny. _Oh, none of this makes any sense at all!_ "I can't get into Hogwarts," she said, struggling to hold onto some scrap of logical thinking, "and I can't stay here. Does that mean that I have to find my friends?" Rhiannon's eyes on her were answer enough. 

"But I can't!" burst out Ginny. "I can't, this is insane! I don't have anything to eat or anywhere to sleep or any shoes and I don't know the way, and I don't have my wand--" She caught at Rhiannon's hand. Normally, she would have died of shame at such an outburst, especially since she didn't trust the dark queen an inch, but nothing mattered in the face of the fear she felt. "I'm not even sixteen years old yet," she said brokenly. "I can't. I can't." 

The lady's face was almost kindly. "Never name that well from which you will not drink, Gwenhyfar." 

"If this matter so much then come with me. If you have the power, then take me where I need to go! You do, I know you do."

Rhiannon shook her head. "Even if I would walk this road with you, I could not. For my power has dwindled, dwindled. My followers have diminished. The world has been changing, Gwenhyfar, for a long time, at least as mortals would reckon it. The time of the great evil is at hand. Either our hope comes soon, or else all hope's end."

Ginny felt the frozen grass under her cheek; she had sunk to the ground and was crying. The dark queen watched steadily, no emotion upon her beautiful face. _I'll just lie here and cry, _Ginny thought._ I really could. I could just cry and cry until I freeze to death and wild animals run out of the forest to eat me. I can't ever leave this spot again. I'll stay here until Draco Malfoy comes through that oak and--_

_Dragon's tooth_! 

Hermione had said that the Malfoys were right behind them, perhaps no more than an hour. That was what she had felt when she was traveling through the worlds, that sense of possession as he seized her and tracked her here. How long had she lain unconscious? Ginny's head jerked up wildly; she half expected to see Draco striding towards her that very moment, the familiar half-sneer on his face. The image stirred something in her that was part excitement, part fear. But-- and the thought struck her with pure loathing and terror-- his father would be with him. Of course he would. The familiar impotent rage went all through her. She hated Lucius Malfoy with all her heart and soul; if it hadn't been for him, she herself would never have been caught by the diary when she was only eleven years old; oh damn him, damn him for making her feel this way, beaten, afraid, lost. 

Ginny simply cowered on the ground like a frightened animal for a long, long moment. A roe deer, perhaps, with great golden eyes, waiting for the predators to close in. And the dark huntress-queen Rhiannon stared down at her all the while. Her eyes were not scornful, not judging, not mocking; it could not really be said that they were anything. But still she stared. 

At last, Ginny had cried through all the tears that were in her. There was a great exhausted peace in her chest now. Sniffling, she sat up, leaning against a tree. The trunk was very old, gnarled, and strong. She looked up at the brilliantly black velvet sky, wisps of clouds chasing each other across the moon. 

All her life, she had been protected, cosseted, and sheltered. Her family had been unable to keep her from the evil that withered some part of her soul when she was barely twelve years old, but their efforts had only redoubled after that. They had wrapped her in cotton wool. And she knew, with a sudden, cold clarity, that it had not been wise. Life had now snatched her from their loving grasp, and she was not prepared. 

Her brothers, her mother, her father, her beloved house at Ottery St-Catchpole. The white dimity curtains in her room, swaying in the gentle breeze from the window. Her narrow child's bed with its white lace coverlet. Waiting, waiting for her to return. But only the gods knew if she ever would. They lay further from her than if they were separated by all the seven seas. 

She almost seemed to see all her family crowded in that room, waving at her. Her dear dumpy mother with an apron tied around her ample waist; her father, his thinning reddish hair sticking up in wisps, his glasses perpetually askew, his robes rumpled. Bill and Charlie, leaning up against the window with their arms folded; their faces filled with the kindly-uncle love of older brothers who had been half-grown when she was born. Percy looking at her uncertainly, itching to go back to writing something in a ledger, his priggishness somehow dear and familiar now. Fred and George smiling at her mischievously, all their miserable teasing of her and her fiery threats of revenge against them forgotten. _Ron_. Dearest to her, and closest to her heart. Oh gods, but that was where the iron bit. She wanted to fall into wild weeping at the thought that she was sundered from him now. 

All waving at her. All retreating from her. How vast was the gulf that now separated her from them. If she tried to go to them, to grasp them as they faded, she would seize only a sea of formless sparkling memories, both bitter and sweet. So she looked at them, and loved them, and let them go. And the thought came to her that beneath all the well-meant smothering protectiveness she'd received from them was a mysterious core of herself, one buried so deeply that she had never called on it before. 

Ginny took a deep breath and rose to her feet. 

"What way can I take, lady?" she asked. 

Rhiannon nodded slightly, as if Ginny had passed a test she hadn't even known she faced. "There are two paths," she said. "One is the King's High Road to the port of Leith, that which the Romans built. It winds all about the forest."

"That's the way they went, Harry and Ron and -- But_ I _can't. I'll freeze to death," said Ginny. 

"Then there is the forest road." Rhiannon turned and pointed a long white finger towards the massive trees. A path wound between two oaks and into the heart of an impenetrable darkness. 

"But it's dangerous. Professor Moody said so. It isn't safe to go there even in _my_ time, and _now_--" Ginny shuddered uncontrollably from merely looking at the dark trees. And perhaps a little, too, from her fleeting half-memory of only time she had ever been in the Forbidden Forest, the one that both was and was not what she saw now. 

"Nothing within my forest will harm the pure of heart."

Ginny gave a short, bitter laugh when she heard that. The lady continued to speak. 

"And the road lends wings to the feet of mortals, Gwenhyfar. But you must not stray from the path. And you must not look back. For that way lies the Dreamtime."

Ginny pretended she hadn't heard what Rhiannon had said. She stared into the darkness for a very long time. 

"Wait," said Rhiannon. Ginny hadn't even realized that the lady was still there. "One gift for you I have." 

"What?" Ginny asked ungraciously.

She took something from around her neck and fastened it about Ginny's. "You have a parchment in your pocket that is torn from the_ Kitap-an Düs_, the Book of Dreams." 

Slowly, Ginny drew it out. She would have been shocked that Rhiannon knew what was in her pocket, except that she felt curiously numb, as if nothing could shock her now. 

"So what do I do with it?"

"Fold it into fours."

Ginny did so, and she felt Rhiannon reach up around her neck. The woman touched the necklace, or whatever it was, she had just given to Ginny. It popped open, and she saw that it was a silver locket with a chased engraving of a bird on its front. A pheonix, perhaps, or some sort of eagle, with a spray of laurel leaves in one claw and a quiver of arrows in the other. Rhiannon took the folded scrap of parchment and placed it inside, snapping it shut. "Now go," she said. 

Ginny shivered, feeling the sudden cold wind that had sprung up. She tried not to think about it. Rhiannon's dark eyes were on her. Weighing. Measuring. Was she supposed to say something more? 

"Uh--"_ Thank you_ were the words that came to mind, the ones her mother had taught her to say, but she didn't feel very thankful. Ginny tucked the locket beneath her shirt and hesitated just one more moment where she stood behind the elderberry bush, fearing to stay where she was, fearing even more to set out on the road. And in that moment, her pursuers came through the worlds and into the clearing. 

Something alerted her; she couldn't have said what it was. Perhaps it was simply that even without her wand she still _felt_ magic. A deep shiver of awareness. Ginny turned to see a line of black-cloaked figures materializing from thin air, one by one. They stepped gravely into the circular clearing._ Run!_ screamed through her mind. _Run!_ Yet her feet were frozen to the spot. Without her volition, her hand crept up to clutch the silver locket around her neck. One of her fingernails popped the catch, and she absently stroked the surface of the parchment, scarcely realizing what she was doing. 

The tall figure at the head of the line lifted its head. A faint shimmer of ashy-blond hair, cruelly handsome features, flat, cold grey eyes. _Lucius Malfoy_. If there was ever a moment to leave, this was it; or at least that was what kept thrumming through her brain, but her legs didn't seem capable of obeying. The solemn, measured procession of the cloaked ones was hypnotizing her against her will. She dimly remembered snippets of conversation she'd overheard when nobody knew she was listening, and knew who they were, who they must be, although she'd never actually seen them before. The Death Eaters. Hermione had been absolutely right. 

The cloaked one behind Lucius moved with such grace that Ginny simply watched its steps, almost like a dance in the cloud-flickered moonlight. She barely even realized how close it was getting to her. Then it stopped, held up a slender hand and turned. Its hood fell back completely. The moon shone down bright as daylight, giving an unearthly glow to the slanted silver eyes of Draco Malfoy. 

_He-- he couldn't possibly see me behind this bush, but he's looking at me! He knows I'm here!_ Ginny was suddenly sure of it, but she still couldn't move, couldn't leave the spot. He had captured her, and there was no escape. 

Ad even as she stared at him, frozen, terrified, she realized that she saw something else-- someone else-- beside and behind Draco. But there was nothing there to see. A dizzying wave of darkness rushed over her. _I've felt this before. Where, when? _

The beginning of second year, she remembered. When she was on the Hogwarts train with Harry and Ron and Hermione, and the cloaked dementors had passed by her in the corridor. As those undead things had been, what she now saw, she knew, was no living man. It--_he_-- was a shadow of malice and darkness, looming behind Draco like the spectre of death itself. Her knees threatened to buckle. The forest lay behind her and there was no way of escape.

But there was, and even through her terror, she knew what it was. It was the only way. 

Dropping the locket to swing on its chain, Ginny turned and ran as fast as she could in the other direction, keeping the massive trees between her and the Death Eaters. She had gone nearly a mile before it dawned on her. She had set her feet inexorably on the forest path that had terrified her so. There was no way out, now, but through. 

___________________________________________________________________

Review! Review! Review! You know the drill.:)


	11. East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Chapter 11. 

East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

A/N: I can't think of a clever quote right now! Thanks to all the reviewers. Y'all will be individually thanked next time. I own everything but what you recognize from JKR. Again, the Ballad of Tam Lin is absolutely authentic to 16th century border Scotland. 

********************************

All during the journey, he had held the jeweled book that held him to her; all through the worlds and times, he traced her by the silver cord that connected them. No matter how thin it stretched, he knew that he would not lose her. Draco had saved Ginny's life only two days before, however little he had meant to do it. He really had only clutched at her instinctively when she went over the balustrade on the night of the Yule Ball; he supposed that the reflexes of a Quidditch seeker had been to blame for that. But she would have died if not for his actions, and that tied them by a bond that could never be broken. _Ah, it's more than that,_ a voice whispered in his head, but he ignored it. _What about all those nights, hour after hour after hour, lying sleepless in your bed in the Slytherin dormitory after kicking out Xanthia or Milicent or Sadina, seeing Ginny Weasley's face luminous against the darkness in your mind's eye, and-- _

There seemed to be no way to shut the voice up as Draco floated through dimensionless space. Also, it had a penchant for run-on sentences. 

Then he felt himself hitting something cold and hard, and smelled green grass as his face skidded across the earth. 

Slowly, Draco picked himself up, glancing around him. Something about these trees looked familiar. The shape of them, and something about the way they grew, the way they leaned towards each other. He was in the Forbidden Forest, he'd swear to it. But it looked wilder, older, the trees more imposing. Darker, somehow._ Of course it's darker, you twit. It's the middle of the night. _But this clearing... he didn't recognize it, and he knew, with a sudden chill, that it could not exist in the forest he knew. He'd flown over it through far too many pre-dawn hours that fall to not be sure of that. He took a deep breath, savouring the sweetness of the air, more full of wild things and green things that the air of his day. _We did it. We really did it. We're here, in the year 1566. _

And the other black-cloaked figures moved to stand about him, seeming to come out of the hollow hill, one by one. He had led them all here, he realized; he had tracked Ginny Weasley to find this place, this time. Draco smiled slightly. _Good._ It was always good to be the leader; it set the tone well for the future of this entire endeavor. 

But then there was no time to think about anything more, because the link between him and her was intensifying, and on the other side of the tumulus he saw her, closed his eyes and only saw her more intensely, as if she glowed white-hot in the moon-dappled darkness. Ginny was on the other side of a large bramble bush. She raised her head, like a deer scenting danger, and for an instant their eyes met. Hers held sheer terror. 

"It's her," he said to his father, who was standing behind him. "Ginny Weasley. I see her, she's here." 

_Don't move_, he whispered to her in his mind, almost gently. _Don't run. What's the point, really? We've caught you.** I've **caught you_. He wondered dimly if the rest were behind her somewhere in the darkness, where he couldn't see them, Potter and her brother and the mudblood and the rest. But it didn't matter. Only Ginny Weasley mattered. 

He stood there, holding her with his eyes, and felt the Death Eaters mass behind him like an army of darkness. Oh, what a glorious feeling that was. He felt the shadowy presence of Lord Grindelwald whispering approval, giving strength. He felt the long muscles in his thighs tighten, readying themselves to move him forward, and the sinews in his hands clench in anticipation of feeling her wrists trapped within his encircling fingers. 

_Oh, you're mine. You're mine_, he told Ginny silently. 

"_Now_," he said aloud. 

And even as he took the first step towards her, she turned and vanished into the forest. 

Draco was startled at that, but the forward momentum of them all was too strong to halt. The wave of black-cloaked figures surged onto the path. 

****************************************

Afterwards, Ginny was never able to piece together the voyage through the forest. It was a journey that took an eternity and no time at all. It ran through a land unlike any she had ever seen or known. But she thought that she had dreamed of it, perhaps, when she was most deeply descended into sleep. Later, all she could seem to bring to her mind, thinking of where it might be, was a fairy story her mother used to tell her before she closed her eyes in her narrow child's bed at night. "Once upon a time," the story began, "east of the sun and west of the moon..." That was where she had wandered. East of the sun, and west of the moon. 

She'd been in the Forbidden Forest one year before, of course, in her own time --_I won't think of that, I won'_t-- But even that had not been like this, nothing like this. Ginny shivered, and turned her face straight ahead. Just the way she had been taught to ride a broom when she'd first been learning in her backyard. "Don't look down," her brother Bill had said, "and you won't fall off." She began to sing the words of a song on the Weird Sisters' latest album, and the sound of her voice, so lost and scared at first, quickly strengthened.

"O I forbid you, maidens all, 

That wear gold on your hair 

To come or go by Edinburgh,

For young Tam Lin is there.

There's none that goes by forest road 

But must leave him a pledge 

Either their mantles of green 

Or else their maidenhead. 

Now gold rings you may buy 

Green mantles you may spin 

But if you lose your maidenhead, 

You'll ne'er get that again." 

Ginny snickered at the last verse. Oh, the trouble she'd gotten into at home when her mother heard her singing it, last summer! But the sound of her laughter was so strange in that forest, on that dark path winding ahead to greater darkness, that the very trees seemed to lean down and listen. She gulped and continued on. 

Only the strength of Ginny's will kept her feet on the path, and her face from looking back. She was never sure if she was walking through this world or not. Often, she was sure she wasn't. It was not cold in the forest, and not warm. Her feet felt no stones beneath them, and no winter wind blew upon her face. There were times when she heard the faraway sound of singing, and saw rings of dancers with long silver hair holding hands around great bonfires. It seemed that she went down to them and sang more sweetly than she ever had before, and that she lay in the arms of one of them and heard the sighing of the sea beneath a bed of pine boughs. And then there were times when she seemed to be walking into the past, and through the day one year ago when she had been in the Forbidden Forest. Lost. Running away from her friends, the book clutched in her hands. Drawing closer and closer to the--

But then she blinked, and realized that she was only standing at the very edge of the path, one of her feet about to step into the forest. Rhiannon's words came back to her, ringing in her ears. _You must not stray from the path. And you must not look back._

Ginny continued to walk, struggling to think about something logical, reasonable. What would Hermione think of at a time like this? The silver locket Rhiannon had given her. She forced her mind full of the locket, wondering what it really was. An amulet? Some sort of talisman? Her fingers went up to stroke the silver. The smooth surface felt oddly comforting. 

_Open the locket_, a low voice whispered. . A male voice, and one of such strength that it might easily have been harsh, or perhaps that was only from the soft guttural accent, German, she thought it was. But a deliciously hypnotic voice, soothing, caressing. Her fingernail picked at the silver seam between the two halves. Then Ginny realized what she was doing, and yanked her hand away. She kept her eyes fixed resolutely on the path. 

She walked on, and the sky and earth whispered to her in languages that no human had ever heard before. The vast net of branches above her head seemed to be weaving themselves into a pattern. It teased at her mind, because if she looked at it long enough it would surely turn into something that made sense. And the pattern became-- yes! she could see it now-- the web of spells binding the god Loki, as she had seen him in the portrait hall at Hogwarts, falling, falling eternally through fire, and she saw his face shimmering through what entrapped him... 

-_-free me from my imprisonment_, his voice whispered to her again,_ free me, free me, Gwenhyfar--_

Ginny stood and stared for so long that she could almost feel the grass growing her feet. She woke from her trance with a start, and thought for a terrfied moment that she had been standing in that one spot for hours, days, years. She would not have been surprised to lift her hand and see fingernails grown to the point where they were curving all the way around her wrist. 

She shook herself, and saw that she was only walking the path, which was worn down into a groove a foot or more below the level of the trees that stood like sentinels about it."Keep it together, Gwenhyfar Alvean Weasley," she chanted to herself over and over. "You've got to keep it together or you'll never get out of here." Ginny counted her breaths, the beats of her heart, the steps of her feet; she _would not _fall into dream. A sourceless silvery laughter mocked her, and she wondered if Rhiannon was its source. If in some strange way, perhaps this entire forest, so like and yet so unlike the one she knew, was woven about the dark lady. 

********************************

Draco's first hint that something had gone badly wrong was the blurring of his vision and the prickly feeling in his mouth.

_Strange-- I've never felt anything quite like this before, wonder what it could-_- 

Then the dull shock splintered through him, and the next thing he knew, Draco was lying on the ground, flat on his back and rather dazed. "Try again, you fools, that's what I said," Lucius was snarling from somewhere to the right of him, and he saw that everyone else seemed to be sprawled on the ground as well. As soon as any of them attempted to move towards the forest path, they were rebuffed by an invisible force that carelessly tossed them back on the grass with the ease of a giant's hand. The younger Goyle in particular seemed to be having an extraordinarily hard time with figuring out what was going on and how to avoid it, and flew backwards over and over and again as Draco got to his feet.  


Cautiously, he prodded at the air on the other side of the grassy hill with his hands, feeling a series of little shocks as he tested the boundaries. It seemed to be a wall of magic that was keeping them from getting any further into the Forbidden Forest, but what sort of magic that might be, Draco could not think. He had moved beneath a tree that blocked the moonlight utterly, and he pulled his wand from its holster beneath his robes. "_Lumos_," he murmured. Nothing happened. He blinked. 

"Your wand won't work here." His father had come up behind him.

"What's this barrier? Is it responsible?" Draco very vaguely remembered hearing something of this sort in a History of Magic class. In earlier times, when preserving the balance of magic was of greater importance than it was now-- well, in his own time, he amended silently-- a greater spell or charm frequently canceled out a lesser one. 

"No, it is not."

"Then why?" _Why_, the question that should never be asked of Lucius Malfoy. But if there was ever a time to make an exception to that rule, this was surely it. 

"Most of our magic isn't the sort that can be done in this place and time. Wand magic in particular."

"You seriously mean that my wand won't work?" Draco asked incredulously. 

"Isn't that what I just said?" Lucius answered impatiently, tapping at the invisible wall. 

"But--" Draco was at an utter loss for words. His head was dreadfully dizzy and he shook it from side to side, trying to clear it. Something was missing, some indefinable, incredibly important thing, as if he'd suddenly lost an arm or a leg. 

Several of the cloaked figures were gathering around them now, whispering urgently. "We can't get through," Draco heard Pettigrew say in low tones to Lucius Malfoy. 

"_Can't_ is not a word I wish to hear at the present moment," his father replied in the icy tones Draco knew so well. 

Another figure came forward and felt out the boundaries of the magical wall with long, slightly gnarled fingers. Yet they were strangely elegant as well; the hands of a skilled craftsman, and they moved over the night air as if in the steps of a dance. Shimmering designs trailed after them-- circles, spirals, the twisted forms of snakes, strange wavelike and knotlike forms. Draco stared hard, but not at the designs. There was something very familiar about those hands. He'd seen them many, many times before, moving carefully, precisely, measuring ingredients, stirring a cauldron, adding a pinch of powder to some potion or other... 

_Oh, bloody hell, potions... _

And even before the man spoke, Draco knew, with a queer sinking feeling at his heart, who he was. 

"It's Ogham magic," Severus Snape said clearly.

"Well, break the spell, can't you? Isn't that the sort of thing you've spent the past year secretly studying?" Lucius asked impatiently. 

Snape turned to Draco's father, and even in the fitful moonlight the motion of one raised dark eyebrow was clear on the Potion Master's face. "I'm afraid it isn't quite that simple."

"Why not?" asked Lucius through clenched teeth. 

"Ogham does not derive from the mortal, nor the human. Its spells cannot be broken." Snape traced one of the serpent spirals with his forefinger, and it glowed red. "Just as I believed. We don't have a prayer of getting through this wall of spells. They're wrapped about the Ogham symbols, and the magic is contained in the trees of the forest themselves. They are not the trees we know." 

Lucius was obviously struggling to control his temper, and despite the emotions tearing through him, Draco couldn't suppress a smirk. "Then explain to me," said Lucius in measured tones, "why my son saw Ginny Weasley vanish down that path not ten minutes ago. In all the research you've done, have you ever seen the answer to that simple question?" 

Now there definitely a sardonic gleam in Snape's eyes. "Well, after all, Lucius, it is said that only gods, immortals, and the pure of heart may walk this path. That would rather tend to exclude any of us." 

Lucius Malfoy swore a muffled oath under his breath and turned away from the forest path. 

And all at once, Draco realized what had happened. "They're gone," he said. "Ginny Weasley and Lord Grindelwald both. I lost them as soon as I touched the Ogham wall." He took a deep breath. "They went through. Both of them. One after the other." 

****************************************

At last, Ginny's feet were growing sore. She wondered dismally how long she had been walking. _Will I ever find my way out? What if I can't? What if I'm just doomed to wander here forever until I die, or maybe I finally do get out and it's a hundred years later and everyone else is dead, or-- _ Ginny shivered as she remembered vague stories she'd heard in the Gryffindor common room when she was wandering around at three in the morning and couldn't sleep. 

"He went into Aladdin's cave," Lavender would whisper to Parvati in the two big armchairs pulled up near the fire, "and was bewitched by the djinn."

"I heard that when they came out again it was a different century," Parvati would hiss back. "The dwarves trapped them in a web of hex symbols." 

"I heard she never came out at all, and she's still there with the shining ones, and if you stand in front of the mirror at Yule and whisper "Bell Witch" three times, she reaches out and grabs you!"

And so on, and on, and on. Ginny had rolled her eyes at the time, and wondered if it were possible to tie Lavender and Parvati's tongues together into a knot. But now, everything had suffered a sea change. She stood still for a moment, taking deep breaths, trying not to fall into panic._ I can get through this if I don't panic. All I need to do is to follow the path, after all. _

She opened her eyes again. 

The straight path stretching ahead of her had vanished. In its place was a crossroads, the four ways leading off in different directions. At its center was a great white standing stone. 

Ginny burst into tears. But the stone and crossroads only seemed to be waiting silently, breath held, until she stopped crying and made her decision. 

"But Gwen has kilted her green kirtle  
A little above her knee,   
And she has gone for Edinburgh  
As fast as she can be. "

She didn't even realize that she had picked up the thread of Tam Lin exactly where she'd left off until she heard the sound of her own voice. But it calmed her a little; as always, the sound of the music she made herself strengthened her slightly. _Ron used to love me singing this song_, she thought, blinking more tears away. _It was his favorite. _Much later, Ginny would reflect on how different all their lives might have been if she hadn't started singing at that precise moment. But there is never any way to know what flows from the divergence of two roads in the Dreamtime. 

"He took her by the milk-white hand  
And by the grass-green sleeve  
And laid her low down upon the flowers  
And asked of her no leave--"

"Ginny?" said a drowsy voice. She broke off singing, glancing around wildy. There was no way to tell its source; it had come from the empty air, the sound lingering everywhere and nowhere. 

It was, unmistakably, her brother's voice. 

And there was something far ahead of her, vanishing behind a tree. Something almost like the shadow of carriage wheels. 

Rhiannon's advice was forgotten. Ginny tore off into the forest as fast as she could run. "Ron!" she yelled. "Oh, where are you? I'm coming, wait for me!"

************************************************

Draco knelt in front of his mother at the side of the King's Road, rubbing Narcissa's hands together in his. They felt so cold, so bloodless. Her face was without expression. Draco was afraid that she'd had a bad journey through the clock tower, something similar to what had happened to him that first time, or perhaps the shock of the Ogham wall had affected her more seriously than the rest. But she would not speak to him or to anyone else, only shaking or nodding her head in response to questions. Silent as she always was, this was even worse than normal. Draco's heart turned over in his chest at the thought that she was suffering something dreadful in silence. 

He hadn't looked at Snape since the moment when they recognized each other. It was no surprise to him that his potions master was a Death Eater, only dreary confirmation. It was yet another one of those pieces of information that he had known without being told. Their eyes had met, and Draco would have sworn that he saw the same expression mirrored in both pairs. A queer sort of expected disappointment. Each of them now knew a bit more about what path the other had chosen. Each had, in some corner of their minds, hoped for better. 

Draco saw a shadow step between him and the moonlight, and glanced up to see the subject of his thoughts standing before him. 

"She_ is _all right, isn't she?" Snape asked impatiently. 

"Yes," replied Narcissa in a clipped voice, rising to her feet."Perfectly." 

Snape put his hands behind his back and began pacing along the winding path that led along the fringes of the forest they could not enter. Draco followed him. "So what now, Professor?" he asked, feeling strangely awkward with the familiar form of address. Of course, he didn't know what might be more appropriate, considering what he now knew. _Esteemed Fellow Death Eater, maybe? Or have we progressed to first names, now that we both know just how far we've each fallen? _

"Carriages are arranged for. We'll take the King's Road to Leith; I always felt that this might be necessary. Nothing passes through the Forbidden Forest now without the Lady's will and permission... neither of which we were ever likely to get."

"Arranged for?" Draco echoed. 

"They've been summoned."

"I thought magic didn't work here."

Snape's look was rather cold, but then it always had been, for all that Draco knew he was the closest thing to a favorite the Hogwarts potion master was ever likely to have. "I sincerely hope you haven't been daydreaming through _every _History of Magic class, Mr. Malfoy." 

"I certainly know they use magic in 1566, but--" began Draco in a defensive tone of voice. 

"No, _we_ use magic. They _are_ magic. You might say that the witches and wizards you have known contain the art as a cup contains water, but those who hold the power today are themselves the vessel. It can be learned, but it's a vastly different art from what we study at Hogwarts."

"Really? How so?" If he could just concentrate on _something_ besides this crushing sense of failure, even for a few moments--

"It's far more--" Snape halted and gestured a circle in the air"--organic, I suppose you might say. Closely related with the seasons and cycles of the year, the strength of the magic waxing and waning. I doubt we would have had this much trouble if it weren't so near to the feast of Yule, but then we couldn't have traveled through the clock tower at any other time. This sort of magic is tied up with the land, too, in a way unimaginable in our time."

"All of it? Really? You mean wherever in the world we go, it'll be like it is here?"

Snape shook his head. "No, no. The magical parts of the world have long since begun to retreat, to lose themselves in the mists. And of those that remain, many are guarded, as you saw. But this is one. A few still exist in Germany as well-- the Holy Roman Empire, they call it now-- and Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, of course,is another."

"That's where we're going," murmured Draco. "That's where the Jewel of the Harem is."

Snape began pacing again. "Yes, well, there'll be time enough for lessons later." He glanced from side to side, but there was only Narcissa, leaning tiredly against a tree a few hundred yards away. "Do you feel the Dark Lord's presence at all?" he asked in an undertone. 

Draco reached out his mind to Grindelwald, as automatically as a man reaching to feel the fingers of his own hand, and with as much certainty that they would be there. When he felt nothing, it was like a amputation. "Nothing, " he said numbly. "He went through the Ogham wall, I'm sure he did." 

Lucius Malfoy fell into step just behind them, murmuring something to Lestrange and Peter Pettigrew over his shoulder. "Ready to go? Good," his father said without preamble. 

"But, we--" Draco stopped, at a loss for words. "We can't simply leave here without Lord Grindelwald." _Or Ginny Weasley_, he added silently. 

"The Dark Lord will find us; he understands how dangerous it is for us to stay here one moment longer than absolutely necessary. I'm sure he had a purpose in entering the Forbidden Forest that we couldn't know." Lucius looked at his son sardonically. "Didn't he tell you?"

"No," mumbled Draco. 

"As for Ginny Weasley, I believe we can do perfectly well without her-- Ah yes, I see that the carriages have arrived." The older man glanced upwards, toward the road. 

"But-" began Draco. 

"Into the coach." Lucius Malfoy's eyes were like chips of cold granite in the moonlight, and the slight wind whipped his silvery hair. Once again, his voice held the tone of command, and the unquestioned expectation that it would be obeyed. 

Draco wondered when things had changed. It had been so long since he'd heard his father's voice that way, since he'd seen that hardness in his father's eyes. But the sight and the sound were so tied up with all the memories of his childhood that it was like seeing an unquiet ghost leap back to life. Gods, but how afraid he'd been of Lucius Malfoy once; it was a fear he seemed to have drunk in at his mother's breasts. 

But he wasn't afraid anymore, he wasn't. What a contemptible emotion, after what Draco had seen that summer, and after what he knew, the truths he knew about his father, about all the Malfoys--

"Didn't you hear me?" the iron voice asked. 

"I heard you," Draco replied, despising the tone of his own voice. "I'm going up, Father."  


***************************************

In a badly sprung carriage rolling down the King's Road towards Leith, Ron's eyes opened, and he sat up suddenly. 

At first, no-one noticed. Moody was talking to Neville in a low voice, and they were opening a black leather bag and turning over the contents of dried bunched herbs on the seat. Hermione was lying back with her eyes closed, her head on Ron's shoulder, trying to ignore the smell of stale dust and God-only-knows-how-many unwashed bodies that had pressed into the cushions before her. Harry was staring out one of the windows, his face expressionless. Although sharing the same ten cubic feet of air, the inhabitants of the coach were immured in their own private worlds. But then Hermione felt Ron's body stiffening all along her left side, and she sat up, too. 

"What is it?" she asked. 

"We have to stop the coach," he said. 

"Stop the coach?" she repeated. "Whyever would you want to do that?"

"I heard Ginny. I heard her voice, she was calling me."

Hermione shrugged. "You were asleep, Ron. It was obviously a dream."

"That was no dream." He shook his head vehemently. 

"But Ron," she said patiently, "I think I even heard you talking in your sleep. Believe me, you were dreaming." 

"No, I wasn't!" he retorted, raising his voice a little. "Harry, listen to me, Ginny's here-- I'm not exactly sure where but I just heard her, maybe along the side of the road somewhere, and we need to stop!"

"Please, be reasonable," Hermione begged. "You couldn't have really heard Ginny, you know you couldn't. She certainly couldn't be in this coach, there's barely room enough for us, and nobody's voice out in the road could carry over the carriage wheels and the closed doors."

Harry turned his head towards Professor Moody and raised an eyebrow, questioningly. The older man shook his grizzled head. 

"What? We're going to stop, aren't we?" Ron demanded. 

"No," Harry said quietly. 

"No? What do you mean, no?"

Harry and Moody exchanged glances, and Hermione lowered her eyes. 

"What's going on? You're doing it again. You're exchanging signals, secret signals-- don't think I don't see you--" 

"Ron, we're not doing anything, really we're not." Hermione attempted to lay a hand on his arm, but he shook it off, his face growing increasingly agitated. 

"We've been through this before, Weasley," growled Moody. "We don't have the time or energy to start it up again." 

Ron turned his face to the cold window briefly, struggling for control. "My sister's out there," he said. "You can't tell me you didn't hear her screaming. She said she was coming, she said to wait for her."

"Er, Ron," said Neville, seeming to realize what was going on for the first time. " I don't think any of us heard anything." 

"But that's impossible." Ron's voice was growing hoarse. "I heard her, I heard her just as clearly as I hear you."

"Why don't you lie back and try to get a little more sleep," Hermione said coaxingly, pressing his hand. 

"Don't patronize me. Don't you dare," snapped Ron at her. 

"I know how you feel, Ron. Or I can guess," Harry said flatly. "But we're not stopping this coach. We can't. The Death Eaters could be right behind us, for all we know. Maybe this is even a trick of theirs."

"Right then," said Ron. He bit his lip. "Right. I see how it is."

There was a moment of silence. 

Then Ron grabbed the inside handle of the moving coach and opened the door, jumping out onto the snow-covered road. 

It took all four of them to wrestle him back inside. 

"Let go of me!" he snarled, struggling to free himself from the eight restraining hands. "Let go!" 

"I don't know-- how much longer I can-- hang on--" panted Neville, Ron's left ankle in his grasp. "Ow!" He did not quite manage to dodge the kick aimed at his head, and fell back against the cushions, whimpering. Hermione was trying to hang onto his wrists and began crying when he swore violently at her; he managed to get one hand free and pushed her to the floor. Harry tried to grab Ron's arms from behind to wrestle him down, but his best friend was using his greater size and strength to fight his way to the door again. "Quickly!" barked Moody at Neville. 

"I'm trying, I'm trying-- oh, where is it--" Neville flipped frantically through the contents of the black leather bag. "Here it is!" He grabbed a packet wrapped in silver foil and pushed it at Moody with shaking hands. The older man shook a dry stream of crumbled grayish-green dried herbs into his gnarled palm and poked at them with a finger. They smoldered, sending up thin tendrils of smoke, and he shoved them under Ron's nose. 

"_Sersemletmek_," he said in a harsh voice. 

***********************

"Is he going to be all right?" Hermione asked tensely, pulling Ron's unconscious body up onto the seat. "Is he?"

"Oh, it's no different from a Stupefying charm, really," said Neville.

"But maybe that's the question we should be asking about Ron," said Harry thoughtfully. "I always wondered if he'd make it through this." 

Her voice grew shrill. "What will you do if you don't think he can? You can't cut him loose now, you know you can't. I'll go with him if you do."

"Nobody's suggesting any such thing," said Harry. 

"Will you do to him what you did to Ginny, a year ago?" Hermione wiped the tears from her eyes, impatiently. "It was a year ago today. Did you remember? I remembered. I never forgot what we had to do."

"What _I_ had to do." Harry turned again so that only the line of his chin and cheekbone could be seen against the full moon shining through the window. "What _I _had to do, Hermione, your hands were kept clean. I made sure of that."

Hermione drew in her breath in a sharp hiss. "If you throw that in my face one more time, Harry James Potter, just _once_ more--"

"What, Hermione? _What _will you do? Something worse than what's happened already, and what's going to happen?" He swung around towards her. They faced each other down, glaring. The silence dragged on and on, broken only by Neville's frightened breathing. Ron's head lolled on his chest, shaken back and forth with each jerky movement of the carriage, and even in this unnatural sleep his face was unbearably tense. 

Moody thrust his grizzled head between them. "A very wise man once said something we would all be wise to heed," he said quietly. "'If we do not hang together, gentlemen, we will all assuredly hang separately.'" He allowed them all to digest his words for a moment. "You know what we fight," he continued. "You know what we face. I'm truly sorry that you have to carry the burden of this knowledge." Harry gave a very bitter, low laugh, and Moody continued as if he hadn't heard. 

"It's more than any of you should have to handle, but I think you can handle it. Yes, even Ron. There are reasons why all four of you were chosen for this mission--and it's not the reason you think." He held up a hand, forestalling Hermione's objection. And after what was, for him, an unusually long speech, he turned back to Neville and began going over the dried herbs again. 

Hermione gave Ron's hand a squeeze, knowing he couldn't feel it. His skin felt oddly alien, tainted somehow by the strange Turkish spell. "I hope I never have to do that again," Neville mumbled. 

"But you will," said Harry from his vigil at the window of the coach, staring out unseeingly into the snowy small hours of the night. "You will." And he wondered if he, too, heard the last faint echoes of Ginny Weasley's despairing cry.   


***************************************

They had been walking down the side of the path that led up to an embankment, and Draco tipped his head up to see, high above, three black carriages at road level, their black horses shifting restlessly in the traces. He sighed. Nothing to be done but to get into one of them, really, although he couldn't shake the vaguely sick feeling of failure, of being at a permanent disadvantage from the very beginning of this venture. A procession of black-cloaked figures was already filing up a path that wound round the embankment. He shifted the _Kitap-an Dus_ under one arm and began to climb. Then he felt the heat seeping through the pages. 

The edges of the book were glowing a fiery red. Draco sucked in his breath and grabbed it with shaking fingers, opening the book to one page and running his right hand over the tiny gems embedded in the parchment. He could feel the presence of Ginny as if she was within his own skin. 

"Draco?" Lucius stopped as he was entering the first coach and called back to the retreating figure of his son far below. 

Draco turned briefly. "I'm going in," he said, not loudly, but his words were carried up to the road on the cold night air. 

"You're_ what_?"

"Into the forest. To get them."

"You can't!" 

In answer, Draco held up the glowing Book of Dreams. "I'll meet you on the King's Road, Father," he called. 

"Just what the _hell _do you think you're playing at?" Lucius snarled. 

But it was too late. Draco Malfoy had vanished through the Ogham wall, slipping through the spells as easily as the night itself. His father stared after him for a long time. 

"Shall we go?" Snape asked, impatiently.

"He's mad," Lucius said at last. "We'll never see him again." 

In answer, Snape leaned out the open carriage door and craned his neck up at the innkeeper's lads from the Lion and Thistle, who were sitting on the coachman's box. "We're not paying you lot to sit here all night," he said. The horses stamped and whinnied in fear at the strange harsh voice, their eyes rolling. 

"Hist, lassie," one of the boys crooned, patting the neck of one of the mares. 

"Horses be wiser than humans," the other said grimly, crossing himself. 

"Eh, aye," the first said dreamily, a vague expression on his face."We must make all haste. So I hae been told. A gold piece at the end o' this journey, an we reach Leith in three days' time."

The second glanced back at the black-cloaked heads and shoulders, silhouetted against the window in the darkness within the coach. "For the dead travel fast," the innkeeper's son said in an undertone. Then he clicked his tongue and slapped the reins against the black horses' necks. The carriage wheels rolled their burdens away. Lucius Malfoy stared out the window unseeingly, thinking, thinking. And far below them, Draco began his journey through what he knew as the Forbidden Forest. And so it was. But it now contained the land that had, by his day, long retreated into the mists, into the shadow of a legend long forgotten. The Dreamtime. 

**********************************

A/N: Review! Review! If you're not on the mailing list and you want to be, tell me! And YES!! Lots and_ lots _more D/G contact in the next chapters. This one was just getting insanely long and I realized I couldn't post anything of the length it was becoming. NEXT chapter, he catches up to her and they're back together, I swear on a big stack of Bibles. Ooo, it's gonna be good. Wow, and what's going on with Harry, Ron, and Hermione? Tensions aplenty there. What happened a year ago in the Forbidden Forest, and what did Harry have to do to Ginny? (Next chapter...)What did Draco learn in the preceding summer about the secret past of the Malfoys, and why did it cause him to lose respect for his father? (Soon...) 

The words of the second coachman ("for the dead travel fast") are from one of the creepiest movies ever made, F.W. Murnau's _Nosferatu_. I really picture Grindelwald as looking like Count Orlov, the undead German Dracula, but with more hair. Last year's _Shadow of the Vampire _was the fictional retelling of the making of that classic silent film. "An" was a 16th century way of saying "if"-- it's not "and" misspelled, btw. 

You may notice that Snape is a bit mellower, but I think that slightly different aspects of his personality are revealed when he's around Draco. When Ginny remembers Lavender and Parvati talking about faerie abductions, Parvati is referring to the famous Bell Witch of Adams, Tennessee. I've been to the farm where her ghost supposedly still lives (or doesn't live, I guess,) it's about an hour from Nashville. The family that was originally haunted by the Bell Witch still lives there and gives tours of the haunted cave, and they show visitors a big scrapbook of ghost pictures. And yes, if you look in a mirror on Halloween night and say her name five times, well, they SAY she comes out to get you. That was supposedly the original source of the Candyman urban legend. 


	12. The Interpretation of Dreams

Chapter 5. 

The Interpretation of Dreams

The remnant of our waking thoughts and deeds move and stir within the soul. 

--Sigmund Freud, _The Interpretation of Dreams. _

A/N: Yes, Draco and Ginny are getting back together!! You may notice that I gave all the Malfoys angels' names-- Gabriel (Draco's great-grandfather,) Michel (his grandfather,) and of course Lucius. Snerk. Klaus and Cisselinde von Drachen are Narcissa's parents, Draco's other (and only living) grandparents. 

Wow. Who would've thought I'd have so many German readers. And readers who speak German. Um, there will be mistakes. Probably even more when they get to Linz, and in several hundred pages they will... all criticism welcome... btw, the Bavaria vs. Austria thing is explained in the Tour Guide. That will be Chapter 14, posted *very* soon. Chapter 15, which gets back to the plot, will probably be posted at the same time. After that, the next several chapters will be posted a lot sooner, too.:)

Thanks to all the reviewers! 

Ooh!!!! Stareyes is starting to do illustrations for JOTH... I just saw her first drawing of Draco at the clock tower and a couple more.... OMG, OMG, words fail me. Leather boots are involved. Y'all are going to love her stuff, I guarantee. Find it at: 

http://www.artisticalley.org/reviews/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6045

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Ginny's steps halted. Her breath was coming very hard and fast through a painful stitch in her side. She wiped the sweaty strands of hair from her face. Had she heard her brother's voice? Had she seen the carriage retreating from her? 

Or had it all been an illusion... a trick of some kind? 

She glanced around. She was standing beneath a enormous oak tree, and the forest was very silent around her. It was a waiting silence. A listening silence, as if some brooding force held its breath. She glanced from side to side, uncertainly. The branches were much too dense overhead for the full moon to penetrate. Or maybe even the sun-- _I don't know how long I've been here, time seems to have no meaning, really--_

And an icy chill rippled down her back. She was no longer on the path. She could see no trace of it. Only the titanic sentinels of trees in all directions. No. No. Oh, no--

Ginny leaned against one of the trees, thinking, trying to retrace her steps. The feel of the bark was like touching living flesh. She stepped back with a gasp. But the tree had turned monstrous, its limbs writhing in anger at her presumption. It swelled to such enormous heights that she could no longer see the top. She clutched at the silver locket around her neck. The tree fell back. Its branches folded inwards, and it was silent. 

She'd done exactly what she had been warned not to do. She'd lost the path. The thought came to her in a way that was almost calm. 

Well, there was nothing to do but keep walking. Ginny moved beneath the branches of the tree that had seemed to threaten her, and it stood silent and motionless. 

The trees were shifting and changing. Their trunks were actually moving. Sort of-- she squinted-- running into each other. The fabric of everything she saw stretched, the colors of green and brown and black sliding together like wet watercolors. The fabric of reality itself was going to rip any second, and something great and terrible would come through, its monstrous clawed hands reaching for her--

--or was it only the forest, seen through her swimming eyes, her terrified tears?--

_Inside the locket,_ a soothing voice whispered in her ear. The same one she'd heard earlier. The parchment. _You need it now, don't you? You need to touch it. To touch the jewels. Her hands crept up to her neck. Yes. Yes, my young one... that's right...now open it..._ And in the moments before the shrieking panic claimed her completely, she parted the halves of the silver locket with a fingernail and grasped the folded parchment inside. A very faint warning voice said that this might not be such a good idea. She ignored it. Ginny pressed the glowing rubies against her fingertips as if she were going under for the third time in a monstrous ocean, and they were life preservers bobbing on the waves before her. 

The world steadied itself, slowly, slowly. Became understandable again. Gravity worked, and Ginny heard the beating of her heart, the frightened sound of her own breathing. She felt almost foolish for having been so afraid. There was nothing to threaten her here. Nothing to fear but fear itself. She'd follow the stream and find her way out; she could hear its chattering sound coming from somewhere to her left, surely she must be almost through the forest.

And on the other side of the Ogham wall, Draco felt the heat pulsing through the_ Kitap-an Düs_, stroked its pages, and linked once more to Ginny Weasley. But he was not the only one who had. 

**************************************************************************************************************

There was none of the numbing shock he had felt the other times he tried to go through, none of the tremendous force barring his entry. It resisted him for a moment and then gave way, the spells parting to allow him access, snapping into a re-formed crystalline structure as soon as he'd passed through them. Draco stood on the path in the middle of the forest, blinking at the weird sourceless light, looking around him at the silent sentinels of trees. He'd only been here once before, he realized. That time in first year when he'd had detention with Potter and Longbottom and Granger, and that insane oaf Hagrid had dragged them all right into the path of Voldemort. Draco couldn't stop a sick shiver from going through him at the memory; even from all those years ago, it still had the power to frighten him, to make him remember how he'd slumped to the ground behind a tree, sobbing and shaking, praying that none of the rest would find him, thinking, _I know who that is, who it's got to be; I could never follow that, I could never believe in that... I'm only eleven years old, don't make me decide, Father, don't make me swear... _What a foolish child he'd been, sometimes. Strange, too, that the memory could be coming back so strongly to him now. 

Sighing, he stopped and opened the_ Kitap-an Düs_. It moved in his hand as if alive, and he almost dropped it in shock. He could feel the incredible power running through it now; he'd had enough training with magical objects to sense it, but he rather thought that any Muggle could have felt it. The only way to find Ginny was through it. Draco was suddenly sure of that. He sensed her vaguely, but he couldn't have said precisely where she was. But he was also, all at once, rather afraid to touch what he held. The book was more powerful here, much more powerful. It only made sense, he supposed, that a Book of Dreams tapped into some sort of power source in the Dreamtime. But it also made him wonder, for the first time, exactly what its powers were.Well, no time to think about that now.

He steeled his courage and opened the book. The rubies within glowed so brightly that they left little spots on the insides of his eyelids when he closed his eyes. Like a blind man, Draco reached out his hand to touch the page. He immediately fell through it. 

Falling. Falling. Tumbling through dimensionless space. Tossed by a vast, indifferent power. Pieces of his memory falling through the void at wildly different speeds as he tried to clutch at them. Random dreams thrown out by this impersonal energy as if by the centripetal force of a spinning top. 

--_falling from a high tower, over and over again, screaming and screaming but somehow I just kept falling and never stopped, and just before I landed I'd always wake up--_

_--a great pair of scissors chasing me down an endless dark hall, opening and closing, opening and closing--_

_--drowning in deep waters and fathoms of ocean closing over my head--_

_--searching for someone through the endless mists, running and searching and never finding them, crying out a name I can never remember when I wake--_

He was losing it, Draco thought almost calmly. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea after all. 

Desperately, he tried to clutch onto some scrap of a memory that might save him. . Thinking about Hogwarts or Malfoy Manor wasn't going to do any good; where had he ever been happy, really happy? The fields and streams of Linz. The fields of purple loosestrife, waving and whispering to each other in the soft summer wind. The von Drachen estate. The rose gardens, heavy with intoxicating scent. He'd play among the rosebushes as a very small child when his mother sat and sketched, and sometimes she'd draw intertwined scarlet symbols, hearts and flowers and half-moons in happy red intricate shapes across the parchment. Draco would reach out his chubby toddler hands to hers as she drew, and the sound of their laughter mingled in the warm air, a delicate sparkling ruby web of magic stretched between mother and son. "_Hexensymbol_," Narcissa would say, her face lit up with one of its rare smiles. His bedroom that looked out over the clock tower, and the comforting sound of its bells tolling in the middle of the night. Even after he could sleep nowhere else, long after he spent endless weary nights staring up at the canopy of his bed in the Slytherin dormitory like a prisoner marking time to a release that never came, he could sleep in Linz, deep, heavy, refreshing sleep, simple and pure as a spring of clear water. The library, with its dog-eared, dusty tomes. The von Drachen librarian, an Austrian ghost. Draco had called him Ziggy when he was very small and couldn't quite get his mouth around the ghosts' real name, which was Sigmund. How many happy hours he'd spent in that library. That was a happy memory. Surely it was. He' d spoken with Ziggy about some of his dreams in the summer, before he left Linz; what had they said?

"Hmm," the ghost said in his mind's eye, tapping his incorporeal cigar on a desk in the library. "The fall from a tower represents separation anxiety. Dreams about scissors represent castration fears, of course. The image of searching for a lost companion means that you long for greater closeness with your mother, and ocean dreams signal a desire to return to the womb. How long were you breast-fed, child?"

"That's the silliest thing I've ever heard," said Draco, and the absurdity of the memory lifted him a bit. "What does that cigar represent, then?"

The ghost shrugged, curling smoke out his ears and through his trimmed white beard.. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Draco could feel himself rising from the sea of dreams. He laid his cheek against the cool smooth parchment surface of the page, sighing softly. 

"I can figure out for myself what the right sort of people are, thanks," the cold voice of Harry Potter said quite distinctly in his left ear, and Draco pulled his head up, startled. But it was too late, and the oceanic force smashed into his mind again from a different direction. Memory, this time. And his memories were far worse than his dreams. 

--Lucius Malfoy's cold flawless face with its one drooping eyelid was advancing on him from a great height as he said, "You'll spoil the boy, Narcissa, you'll make him soft, and that is one quality no Malfoy may possess." And then his favorite house-elf, his old nurse Tibby, had given a little shriek of pain and fear, trying to crouch back into a corner. But his father was far too strong and fast for her, and house-elves were not built in such a way as to defy their masters. So she only cried as she went out the window. The sight of her great eyes liquid with tears the last thing he saw, and he knew it was his fault, all his fault, she'd tried to sneak food up to him when he was in his room being punished for something and was sick with hunger. His mother had tried, too, but she couldn't go out a window of course, people would have noticed, people would have asked, what would their friends, or at least the people in their circle, think? But what happened to her behind closed doors, he was never to know; she only because more silent than ever-

--silent, his father would be silent for days and weeks on end sometimes, ignoring Draco's very presence in a room, turning his cold grey glare across his son as if he no longer existed; Lucius would never lay a hand on him but Draco sometimes wished that he would, surely nothing could be worse than the icy disapproval, the knowledge that he'd failed again. He had been ten years old when he befriended a Muggle girl with long red hair in the village and walked through the apple orchards with her. They giggled together and played cat's cradle as they knelt in the long grasses of the Kentish fields; he whispered that he liked her, touching her fingertips as if stroking precious silk, and he gave her a chain of magical daisies that would never fade.... But somehow his father had found out about it. Not a word was ever said, there was only a dreadful rotten silence that overlay the workings of whatever happened next, but his friend's family left Kent in a large black removers' van in the middle of the night, their faces haunted and strained. He had gone out into the main street of the village crying after them, running, waving with all his might at the girl in the back seat with her face pressed up against the glass, and she had pushed the window open and spat on him. "I hate you, Dray!" she had shrieked. "My mum was right! The Malfoys are all the same! All the same!" The shredded daisies landed at his feet. 

Draco had trudged back to the manor after that and, as he had fully expected, was locked in his room on rations of moldy bread and water. But the silence and the isolation were worse, much worse, and by the end of it he had not seen a human face or heard a human voice for a month and a half; even the house-elves were all too afraid to speak to him. Every book had been removed from the bookshelves, and the chess set was gone from the window seat. He found a copy of _Webster's Unabridged Wizarding Dictionary_ forgotten in the back of a closet and read it for hours on end, pausing occasionally to pace the room and trace his fingertips across the curtains, permanently closed with charms. He knew that the fields he would have seen stretching outside were green now, but in his mind's eye they were barren and brown, as if a dark wizard had stretched out his hand and forever withered them. He counted the tiles of the ceiling and the patterns on the rug; sometimes in the middle of the night they began writhing on their own, and he'd thought quite calmly that he was going mad before he was even eleven years old. Before he ever had a chance to go to Hogwarts, to escape this house. 

Six weeks he was utterly alone, day after day and night after night; every other being might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Draco never saw his mother. Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps everyone was dead. Perhaps nothing existed anymore outside of this room. These thoughts sometimes seized his mind and wouldn't let go, and then he would have to turn his head to the wall and stuff his pillow in his mouth to keep from screaming. 

Then, one night, when he'd given up all hope, his father had come and spoken to him in a low hypnotic voice, very late, when the rest of the household was asleep. Whispering that Muggles were deceitful and untrustworthy, rotten to the core, and Mudbloods were worse, the Muggle-born who dared to ape their wizarding betters. But worst of all were the pureblood wizards who refused the fate appointed to them, who were too timid, too soft, too weak to seize the power that was theirs.

"We alone are born to rule," he'd whispered to his son. 

"And that's..." Draco fumbled for words "... good... isn't it?" 

"Destiny cannot be defined by petty moral questions. We are beyond good and evil." 

And Draco had nodded his head and agreed, looking at Lucius Malfoy anxiously, reading his face for some sign of approval. "Is that why we hate the Weasleys, Father? The Muggle-lovers?"

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"All of them. The mother, the father, the cousins, the sons, the daughter. There can be no exceptions."

"Oh." 

"Never forget that you are a Malfoy," his father had told him. "Never... never... " And Draco no longer wanted to escape. Only to please his father. There was no other fate for him, and he wanted none...

--and he never did forget; but now it was one year later and he was eleven years old, standing on a step stool at Madam Malkin's in Diagon Alley, being fitted for his first set of school robes. Looking over to see the green-eyed boy with the messy black hair standing next to him. His heart leaping, a shy smile on his face, saying, "Hello, Hogwarts too?" Longing for friendship, for acceptance. Gods, but how he wanted a friend, a real friend, not those morons Crabbe and Goyle who hung around him because their fathers fawned on Lucius Malfoy and their mothers came to garden parties at the Manor, but someone to talk with, to share secrets with, to run and fly and dream with... But he didn't know how to do it, didn't have any practice. He hated the sound of his own boasting voice, and when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the far wall, what he'd thought was a smile was actually a sneering smirk. Still, he'd tried again on the Hogwarts Express, knowing what he was trying to say was coming out all wrong, but persisting anyway. Offering his hand. And the other boy had turned him down, eyes cold, voice cold, going off with that damn Ron Weasley, who pulled him into a tight little circle of best friendship, leaving no possible room for Draco. How terrible he'd felt that day, knowing that he'd failed. But a Malfoy didn't show such things...

--twelve years old, standing in front of Flourish and Blotts, watching the same green-eyed boy with the lightning-shaped scar pose for pictures with that idiot, Gilderoy Lockhart. But Draco didn't particularly care if Potter needed to feed his ego at that moment, or was angling for the front page of the Daily Prophet. No, what made his heart contract in his chest was the sight of the girl with the red-gold hair and the golden eyes. Draco had been coming out of the bookshop when he saw her in a corner, waiting, and the world had seemed to stop for an endless moment as he watched her. He couldn't have possibly said what he was looking for, or why his feet seemed rooted to the spot, but it was as if his heart had known something, on seeing her. That he had never seen her before, he knew. But he had known her for lifetimes upon lifetimes. And still he stood, and stood, and stared, and stared, thanking whatever gods might be that his father wasn't here.

The girl must be for Hogwarts, first year probably; who could she be? There was potential power in her glance, ambition too, she had the look of a Slytherin. Her face with its high cheekbones and square jaw was very grave, but there was a sort of light dancing behind it, as if her soul couldn't help but peep out through her eyes. He had to find out who she was. If she was new, she would need... _friends_, and a sort of rush of images went through his head, of all the things he could show her, the things he could share with her, the long talks they could have as they walked around the lake, the whispered secrets they could exchange in the long grasses of the fields behind the clock tower... She was a child and so was he, but he felt something on seeing her that he had never felt before, the mysterious beginnings of some sensation he had yet to know. And Draco watched her, trembling, as if before a long-locked door about to swing wide.

Her face lit up, honestly lit up, with golden radiance, and he could see how beautiful this girl was going to be. For an instant Draco almost thought that the look was for him, that she'd seen him and recognized something in him as he had in her. He started forward eagerly. Then he saw Potter tipping a stack of books into a new cauldron by her side. The girl turned towards him. The smile was for Potter, and so was the inner glow, the eagerness, and the hero worship. And the stupid prat didn't even see it. Draco's chest went cold, and he somehow found himself face to face with the other boy. "Bet you loved that, didn't you?" he asked, sneering. 

And the girl spoke, finally. "Leave him alone, he didn't want all that!" Her voice was cold, and she glared at him with dislike. She knew who he was, he realized. And when Draco looked up and saw the youngest male Weasley spawn headed towards them, an angry scowl on his face, he knew who _ she _must be. The girl didn't really look much like the rest of them, but that hair... Ginny Weasley, youngest of the brood. His natural enemy, as he was hers. He groped for the most self-punishing words he could think of. 

"Potter, you've got yourself a _girlfriend!_" he drawled.

The girl had gone scarlet, he had said all the nastiest things he could imagine to her brother and Potter, and his father, Draco seemed to recall, had ended the day in a brawl with her father. The chance was ruined beyond repair. But a Malfoy didn't care about such things...

--the rush of sounds and images was coming faster now, more jagged, more disconnected in time and space. Pansy's voracious eyes, shining with excitement, turned towards him as they crouched in the ancient Roman hypocaust beneath Malfoy Manor, hearing what they should not have heard, learning what they should not have learned. _What a laugh, Draco... what a laugh... little Ginny Weasley, in the Chamber of Secrets... ._ Marie-France Tessier and her red-gold hair, falling about him like a shining curtain in her rose-satin bed... _Mon cheri, mon Draco, laissez-moi... je peux n'être pas plus ce quie suis je... _Voices on the other side of the hedge in the rose gardens of Linz, that summer, the voices of Klaus and Cisselinde von Drachen ._ They are upstarts, the Malfoys, all of them, Gabriel, Michel, Lucius. And the boy? He has his father's eyes. He is his father's son. I see nothing of Narcissa in him... _Pink roses in his hands, roses that should have been given to Pansy but he couldn't bring himself to do it, he was watching a thousand tiny figures circling below him on the dance floor at the Yule Ball, but all his mind on only one, one brilliantly copper-gold head glowing in the fairy lights, turned always and forever towards Harry Potter...

--and with that remembered image of Ginny, the tidal wave of memory, or dream, or whatever the hell this was, might have been made of sulfuric acid, which Longbottom was forever brewing by mistake in Potions class, and which Snape continually threatened to force the round-faced boy to drink. Draco felt as if he were swimming in a sea of the caustic substance now. Every emotion from the most painful memories he had ever experienced was attacking him from all sides._ I need her_, he thought irrationally._ I need her now. Ginny. Ginny, I could find Ginny, I've got to find Ginny. Through this book. _

With that thought, the poisonous flood of memory was stopped for a moment. Draco struggled to understand what was going on. There was a flash of lucid thought at least, as if grabbing onto a piece of flotsam in a shipwreck. He'd tapped into the extraordinary power of the Book of Dreams somehow, but it was too much for him. It was overwhelming his mind. If he had understood the analogy, he would have thought instantly of an electrical outlet with far too many plugs in it, sparking, threatening to blow its circuit.

His mind was lined with a bottomless pit of dream and imagination, mostly dark, some terrible, but his memories were far worse. Ginny. If he could only hold onto the image of Ginny, the smell of her hair, the remembered feel of her skin-- 

Draco staggered forward, still holding the book. He was walking on the forest path again. He was reasonably certain that he was in the real world. But when he blinked, and then looked round again, he saw that he had somehow come to a crossroads. Four paths led in opposing directions, and at the center stood a tall white stone pointing to the sky. Oh Gods, what now? He looked from side to side in desperation. 

And in the space between one heartbeat and the next, there was a tall dark man standing before him, an invisible wind whipping at his cloak. His blue-black hair was moving, too, in patterns that no real wind could ever create. His eyes were fathomless, and his skin was white as death. Draco actually felt his mouth go dry. He was in his sixth year at Hogwarts; he'd taken _Unearthly Beings-- How to Recognize and Hopefully Avoid Them_, and as a Malfoy he'd gone much further into the study of unclean spirits and dark entities than was healthy for any sixteen-year-old boy to do. But this-- person? thing?-- before him was utterly outside his experience. Or was it?

A vague memory stirred in his mind, just a little. A dusty book in the Malfoy library that only opened to the hair from the head of a Drow elf, a feather from the wing of the great Roc that carried Aladdin and the Forty Thieves in its talons, and fur from the pelt of a manticore, all woven together into a lanyard and laid across its pages. The crabbed red script that only appeared to a Revealing spell whispered on the night of a blood moon at Beltane... 

_For many gods there are, and many devils also. Some that do good, and some that work evil. Yet above them all are the Seven Immortals, those that walked before aught else lived, or breathed, or suffered. But of them it is forbidden to speak. It is not given to mortals, to love the Endless..._

And Draco knew who the man must be. He remained oddly unafraid, and was surprised at this a little, but only a little. It was as in a dream, when all things are possible. "Lord Morpheus," he said. 

"Draco Lukas Malfoy." The dark man inclined his head. 

"Where-- where am I?"

"You have entered my country now." Lord Morpheus began to walk down the path, and Draco followed. He noticed that the Lord of Dreams wore black boots of some curious material that left no imprint on the earth. 

"I used to have this recurring dream where I was falling off a tower," said Draco, thinking that it seemed a perfectly natural thing to say. "But I'd always wake up just before I hit the ground. I'd be in the worst sort of cold sweat, too. Terrified that if I'd fallen before waking up, I would've died. Tell me, is that true?"

"I cannot say." Lord Morpheus shrugged. "You never fell."

"Oh." Draco was oddly disappointed. "I suppose I'll never figure it out." 

They walked a little further, and Draco wondered detachedly if they'd just keep walking and walking, walking off the edge of the earth into the mists that curled around the edges of the flat earth, falling where the wild wind whirled and the ships of unwary mariners awaited them, and Ginny was waiting there too in the form of a mermaid with poisonous green scales, combing her long fiery hair and singing songs to lure sailors to their doom...

"Ouch!" The edges of the _Kitap-an Düs _were glowing so hot that they burned his fingers. He sucked on their tips, jolted back to himself for the moment. What insane rubbish he'd been thinking. He had to hold to reality, to count the steps of his feet and the beats of his heart, not to sink into the madness and illusion of the Dream Country... 

"What do you here, little dragon, little dreamer?" Lord Morpheus was asking. 

"I'm looking for Ginny Weasley," Draco replied. 

"And how will you find her?"

"Through the Book of Dreams." It glowed now like the heart of witchfire itself. 

"Give me the book." The Immortal held out his hand, and it seethed with the dead white light of a moon rising over bottomless seas. 

"Why?"

"That is a thing that mortals were never meant to touch."

"I'm touching it," said Draco. 

"You will pay a price that mortals were never meant to pay."

"Can I find her without it?" _Immortals tell only truth_, Draco remembered reading in that book in the Malfoy library. _Although they do not always know how truth looks, to a man.._. 

Lord Morpheus shook his head. His eyes were like the dark matter that lies at the center of galaxies. 

"Then you can't have it." A calm peace passed through him. Draco laid his hand flat on one of the pages of the open book, feeling the power that hummed through it. And inside his ears, he heard a gravelly voice, whispering words he had almost feared he would never hear again. _My young apprentice. The time has come. The time to strike, and to seize_. It was, unmistakably, the voice of Lord Grindelwald. 

He turned and ran down the path, leaving the dark Lord of Dreams, who continued to look after him, motionless.

Everything in this land seemed to have the quality of a dream, both more and less real than waking life. So, too, it was with Lord Grindelwald. Draco saw him, or thought he saw him, yet he couldn't say if the dark lord was sitting or standing, solid or insubstantial, in the mortal plane or out of it. Yet he knew, unmistakably, that he was there. In the stones of the path, the darkness under the limbs of the trees; the space between one breath and the next, Grindelwald had taken shape. Draco felt the dark lord's presence again, and the relief that swept through him was overwhelming. 

" You've returned," he whispered. 

_Yule dawns soon, a few days only_, Grindelwald said without words._ The time of my greatest power is near. It is the hour to strike. It is now that we may take the girl into our circle, and for our own._

The only sign of the feelings rushing through Draco at that moment was the faint smirk on his face. He knew how to hide his emotions well; it had become second nature in the past year. 

_This pleases you?_

"Yes." If the dark lord knew just how pleased he was at the thought of getting Ginny Weasley at his mercy... But then, Draco supposed that he did. 

_She's close, so close, oh, I can feel her._ A hot excitement ran through him. But Draco didn't dare to allow his thoughts about her to run riot for even an instant, or he'd lose control. And that must not happen; he sensed that the hour of trial and testing was coming, and he would need all his strength. "But why now? Why Yule, my lord?".

_Have they taught you nothing about the days of power at that school of yours?_ Grindelwald's voice in his head was gently chiding. 

"We learned a bit," said Draco. "The great feasts are Beltane, Midsummer, Samhain, Lughnasa, Mabon, Yule, and Imbeholc. We'd generally have some sort of ceremonial dinner at school, except Midsummer, of course. And often we had a ball or something as well. I suppose that's about all."

_A pity, for you must understand this. But it is enough for you to know that the power of the oldest magic ebbs and flows with the cycle of the year. On those six days, the veils between the worlds grow thin. The immortal may walk among the mortal. The girl moves now at the borderlands between the worlds of gods and men, beneath the world-tree... I see her.. yes... but only you may lead me to her._

The smile on Draco's face was sinister, and his eyes glittered like the shadow of moonlight on snow. "How?" he asked. 

_You must allow me further into you than I have been hitherto, my little dragon._ In a sort of nightmare vision, his spidery white fingers of unnatural length reached out towards Draco's head. 

Draco didn't know why, but he flinched slightly; it seemed a reaction so instinctive that he had absolutely no control over it. That damn little voice was screaming. Perhaps after they returned he could have it surgically removed. 

_Will you allow this? It is a thing that cannot be done unwilling. _

"Yes," Draco whispered back fiercely. "Yes!"

_When we are joined--_ Grindelwald paused, in his voice, or his thoughts, or whatever this communication was--_Then you will find her, my young apprentice. You will see what she sees. You will know what she knows. You will walk through her very mind. _

And if Draco had still harbored any doubts, they were gone in an instant. He bent his fair head to one side, permitting the dark lord easier access to him, willing his mind to be open. He felt a touch cold as death. The skeletal hands on his skull. 

The sound of his feet walking the forest path grew louder and louder. Then it vanished, and he felt the sudden jolt of connection, a bit like a portkey, a bit like time travel through the wormhole; this sensation that a hook that had been attached in his head and given a sharp, profound pull. 

The world vanished. Transmuted into a fog of flickering shadows and dark shapes. Draco looked at the dark lord walking at his side and saw without much surprise that he glowed silver, a mist of profound power streaming away from the pulsing outlines of him. Rivulets of power ran down from his hands, and a circlet of poisonous light shone from his brow; he was taller than the tallest trees, great and terrible beyond human imaginings. And one of his immortal hands was still on Draco's head. The power was shooting into him, more than any mortal should have been able to endure; and yet, somehow, he was enduring it. It thrummed through his veins and he knew that he now held more magic than any wand in the world could ever have given him; it was filling him, spilling over, he couldn't begin to contain it. 

Yet he knew that he could use it... use it to find Ginny. She walked at the edge of his powers of perception. 

_Now open the Book of Dreams, and take the pen in your right hand. _

Draco did so. The rubies were glowing so brightly now that he knew he couldn't have looked at them with the naked eye, without the power of Grindelwald running through him. 

The knowledge of what to do next was transmitted directly to him, without any need for the intermediary of words. Or perhaps it rose from within his own mind and had nothing to do with Grindelwald at all. There was no way to tell anymore. And he knew, suddenly knew, what this might mean. If he had Ginny Weasley, and Lord Grindelwald was at his side... what the hell did anybody need Lucius Malfoy for? 

He set the pen to the parchment and began to write. 

_Come to me, Ginny Weasley. Come to us. _

**************************************************

A/N: Review! Review! Sign up for the mailing list if you're not already on it. 


	13. Author's Notes

Author's Notes:

Chapter 13 of Jewel of the Harem is up-- but not here. 

Due to my disagreements with ff.net's policies, I am no longer updating stories here. Another one of my fics (_The Confessions of Harry Potter)_ was removed without warning. Which meant that the reviews also disappeared, all because they apparently couldn't be bothered to have the simple common courtesy to warn me it was going to happen. Fictionalley (where it's also posted, same version too) felt that the story fit under an R rating, but evidently it was all too much for the sensitive ff.net souls. 

I am not interested in participating at a site that practices arbitrary censorship. More and more authors are feeling the same way (Sharon Armstrong just left too, check her out on FA, she's amazing) and if we ever do reach a critical mass and get tired enough of this to _all _quit posting here, ff.net's behavior may come back to haunt them. Until then, they can keep right on doing their thing without me (and I'm not the only one who's decided this.) I don't know if I'm going to go to the trouble of removing what's already up, but from now on _Jewel of the Harem_ will only be updated at:

http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Anise/

Chapter 5 is up there, which is the next chapter and the equivalent of 12 + 13 (they're longer on Fictionalley.) 

That specific chapter link is at

http://www.schnoogle.com/restrictedsection/fic.php?fic=sch:/authors/anise/JHGCBO05.html

The NC-17 chapters (and there _will _be some) will be posted at restrictedsection.org when the time comes. If you're on my mailing list, you'll know about them! There's so much coming. StarEyes is now doing fanart (you've got to see her LeatherBoots!Draco,) and yes, it's true-- I'm a filmmaker and I'm working on short fanfilms for next year. So sign up on the mailing list, already!!!

And thanks for being JOTH readers...

I'll leave you with a quote from legendary Czech director Milos Forman (_Amadeus, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The People Vs. Larry Flynt._)

_When the Nazis and the Communists first came into Czechoslovakia, they declared war on "pornographers and perverts." Everyone applauded them; after all, who wants perverts running around in the streets? But then, suddenly, Shakespeare was a pervert, Hemingway was a pervert... It always starts in that innocuous way, but then the door is opened wide to all sorts of persecution. _

So think about what you want freedom of speech to be in this information society we call the Internet. Like so many other freedoms, it can so easily be taken away. 

To learn more, check out the Blue Ribbon Internet Freedom of Speech Campaign at:

http://www.eff.org/br/

And there's:

http://forms.aclu.org/

http://free.freespeech.org/unlimitedfreedom/

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/default.html


	14. Come and see the fanfilm!

So There I Was, At A Moral Crossroads...

having sworn I'd never post anything on ff.net again after one of my stories was summarily removed. _(The Confessions of Harry Potter,_ the one that's _Mea Culpa, Confiteor_ on FA, where the mods felt it was an R.) Without notifying me. But... I worked out a compromise. I am not posting any more_ fics_ here. Nope. Never again. 

BUT... I spent 130 hours (yes, you read that right) on a four and a half minute fanfilm of "Jewel of the Harem," my epic angsty history-filled D/G drama. The reason it took so very very long, and was such an investment of blood, sweat, toil, and tears, is that it's the very first motion graphics HP fanfilm ever made. There's even a cookie of 3D animation at the end. After such an insane amount of work, I obviously want as many people as possible to see it (reviews are also nice, hint hint.) And I know that there are people who only read ff.net. So... come see the fanfilm! :) It's at:

http://www.nashvilleinsanity.com/myfilms/joththemovieindex.htm

Smiles, 

Anise


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